Camping: Monday

[elfs]

I am tired. I am sore. I've had a lot of fun. We started out Monday late, after a breakfast of cereal, packing up "the last few items" which took us until 2:00pm in the afternoon. Our biggest crisis had been that our previous packing crate, a 30 gallon monster, was too big to fit into the car with two children and the 26 gallon cooler. We lucked out that shastaw had given us some unused 18 gallon containers, and I quickly retrieved one and repacked the car with it. The few items that could not fit completely got packed around it. When we were done the car was fit to explode, and the tents and camp chairs were bungee'd very securely to the roof.

I took the wrong road and made the trip an hour longer than it needed to be, but eventually we made it up into the mountains. We were running low on gasoline and I had to stop at the one town, with the one gas station, for forty miles in either direction from Enumclaw and Yakima, that being Greenleaf, where they wanted gasoline for $2.769. We would learn, on the way out, that a week of rising oil prices had led to a weekend price of $2.999. I filled the tank anyway and bought a bag of beef jerky. Yummy!

The girls tolerated the trip very well, playing and singing. When we arrived at the campsite by the White River we discovered that the credit card machine was dead and they took cash or checks only. I had left my checkbook at home, and Omaha found she had only one check left. A disaster! We left an IOU with the camp host; I would drive into town the next day and get cash needed to make the trip possible.

We set up the tent and put out the pads and sleeping bags, and then we made a fire for dinner. We had a helpful but nosy neighbor who introduced himself as Doug and his wife as Beatrice. Her taste in literature, if the book in her hand was any clue, went to Triumphalist fantasy novels (pre-Rapture mythology that an outbreak of Evangelical Christianity will result in the vast majority of humanity becoming Christian). He was helpful in that he leant us his hatchet, as I had forgotten mine, and I needed it to split firewood. He was nosy in that he was fascinated with the radiant heat oven Omaha was experimenting with while we made hamburgers. He said "It [was] so nice to see a whole family, still together, everyone working and getting along so pleasantly." Mindful of his wife's reading, I made polite noises, pulled out of some Promise Keepers literature I had once read, to the effect that society didn't make it easy but we were determined to make it happen anyway. He nodded gravely with understanding.

The hamburgers were fabulous, and the "oven" worked quite well, toasting the fries. It was a delicious dinner. Afterwards, while we were cleaning up, I snatched the last of the fries off Omaha's plate and she looked at me. "You're like a raccoon!" she said.

The girls in their sleeping bags.
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

We put the girls to bed in their tent, because by then it was very dark. They brushed their teeth and went to sleep after some healthy giggling. After an hour or so while Omaha and I read our books we went to bed. I could hear the river, very low as the snowpack last winter was very shallow, hissing and crashing less than a hundred yards away. Every once in a while I heard that curious thumping sound, a kind of negative pressure wave. The stars were beautiful.

Comments

[slfisher.livejournal.com]

That's funny, I wasn't far from Yakima myself. Boise to Portland via Kennewick (actually, almost Kahlotus and then some other town in Washington nearby that starts with a B).