Thursday, May 12, 2011

Camping has always been a source of family fun and memories in my family.

The year I finished the second grade I had barely gotten out of school when we were off on the first camping trip I can ever remember going on. It was late May, and I took the end of the school papers with me on the trip, or I may not have remembered when we went. My mother could not have been pleased with the mess but let me take them, maybe to keep the kids entertained as much as anything. We merrily scribbled on them as we traveled. We had new sleeping bags, a new tent, new fishing poles, new tackle, new coolers....  We had them because my dad had sold his prized vintage 45 Colt, he sorrowed at its loss but my dad has always given up his things for mom and us kids, when it was needed, he loves us. When our family had started to grow, after their marriage, he had had to sell his 1957 Thunderbird, also his prized possession, to buy a bigger car. The family needed a backseat to fill up.

We went to Brownley Dam Reservoir on the Idaho Oregon board, a hundred or more miles away, I am not really sure how far it was, but it was a long ways to the 5 of us children, all stacked like cord wood in the back seat of the car. Grandma, Gladys, Grandpa, Jim, Lynne and Zonna went with us for the trip. I remember songs around the campfire, sleeping in the big old tent, fighting with the Aunts and siblings, sometimes a tent for a week is a small place. One of the days we were there we had been fishing on the shores of the reservoir when we had decided to go back to the campground for lunch, we had got all the way back to the camp when mom and dad discovered that my youngest brother, about two at the time, was not in the car. We rushed back to the shores to find him on a rock, where a man and lady had found him sleeping. The incident had scared my parents so bad, I remember them counting us before the car moved for months. My dad and granddad would go to the base of the dam at night to catch catfish, to fill our coolers, to take home. My dad to this day recounts an odd air craft hovering over him and his father, it made no noise and flew in a manner not possible for our technology, at the time or this time for that matter, yes, my very religious, never lies, dad and granddad both believed, to the bottom of their souls, that they saw a alien craft. Do I belief they did, yes. The camping trip was one of the highlights of my childhood, the only real week long vacation we ever took in my childhood, it was priceless.

Poppie and I love to camp. We have always tried to take our kids, older and younger camping. When the older ones were small, we went huckleberry picking for a long weekend with my parents, the younger girls, my sister and her family had another wonderful time of memories. When Goofy was 11 we took the kids camping near our home, in the woods, we had just gotten there when we found beer and pop bottles shattered in the creek, I dislike partiers that have no care for the woods. We spent an hour cleaning them up, we had check and rechecked the swimming area for glass before the kids were allowed to play in the water. Goofy climbed up on a boulder and slide down between it and a rock, yes, she found the only piece of glass left, slicing her foot open. We wrapped a towel around the foot to try to stop the bleeding but it wasn't wanting to stop. I didn't have time to hook the camper back up so Goofy, Joe, our foster kid, and I took the truck to go to the hospital, we left Poppie, Bug and Mokie at the campsite. It took 45 minutes to drive to the hospital. Once at the hospital the Dr couldn't stitch the foot without putting her under, she had just eaten lunch so we had to wait hours before the surgery could begin. They had to repair a severed ligament in the arch of her foot, that finished that camping trip, Joe had returned to the campsite with the truck to get Poppie and the kids while I waited with Goofy for the surgery.

 Since our little girls, blessed our lives, we have always gone camping the first week in August, the week of Yogies birthday, sometimes we go again the first week of September for Booboo's birthday, but that is harder with them being school age now. We have such good memories of watching them cast their poles, skip rocks, kiss fish, swim, wade and fall into the water depending upon their age. We have never taken the little girls a long way away camping, we have learned that driving a hundred miles away, doesn't make the woods any nicer than the woods right up the valley.  We have the ability to go to the woods and be far away from our busy lives, but the safety of checking on our little farm, if needs be, costs less and we get to go more often so more memories can be made. The fun of the trip is about our time together not the distance we travel, maybe as they get older we will venture farther but for now we have never felt the need..... tomorrow.

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