Graceful Travel?

You know why I am disturbed when I travel, you know that I am a cold-nature person, and you also know I have kids, I think that is about all that needs to be said about that… But I will go into the subject anyway. It is just more fun to share the crazy with you!

My daughter came along when I was 20. I was so excited to have a little girl. I dressed her up in frilly dresses and bonnets and really took a lot of pride in how she was dressed. Packing for our trips was pretty time consuming, and it of course took a lot of room, with frills and fluff, dresses and petticoats take up space. 

My daughter was 9 months old when we took our first ‘big’ trip. It was one of those family road trips that are better not done. We drove something like 10 hours and stayed over in hotels while we would go visit family and friends and drove a lot in afternoon traffic… that’s all I remember of the trip, really. My husband and I (this is my ex-husband) loaded up the car, took off for parts known, and well, got lost, had a flat tire, drove through smoke, rain, and stayed in horrible hotels, my daughter was just a baby, she was miserable. I was as well… My ex was the worst of all.  He pretty much vowed to not go anywhere again. That trip set the tone of our family vacations. Sad as it is, that was the tone. 

We took a trip through New Mexico and Arizona one year, it was pretty long and, well, crazy. My ex'x family was in Arizona, we visited his real dad, and met his new step-mother and sisters.his aunts and uncles on that side, .. it was kind of a family reunion of sorts, but it was so bad. We stayed in a couple of hotels, a night with his family in Goodyear, and a few nights camping in a tent. It was cold in the mountains. It was hot in the lowlands. We drove and drove and drove for what seemed forever, and not much of that trip was memorable. Except that one morning, we drove through a
kaleidoscope of butterflies. I nearly cried, all I could think of was so much traffic and so many butterflies, that they would all end up dead.Oh, and the hike up into the White Mountains... we got lost even though we had a detailed map of the mountains, and, well... I know that I was tired, emotional, and well, crazy, but I was ready for the trip to be over.

Through the years, I worked as a Girl Scout leader and took our troop to weekend stays at the lake where our council had their camp. It was nice, not too far from home, I could pack up 18 girls and my helper and I took off and had no problems. The trips were well planned, organized, peaceful (as peaceful as 18 young girls can be), and I loved being outdoors. Our trips out of town were not so great, we got rained out a couple of times, and I really didn't enjoy traveling with a lot of kids that weren't my own.

My husband’s family had Summer family reunions where we camped out at the lake, which was nice, since one of the reunions was at our house, the lake seemed really nice. One year we rented a cabin, that was wonderful, bathrooms right on the premises and beds for everyone, and a dock for the boats, a real kitchen... but the tent camping was always memorable. 

One Summer, we slept in our screen tent, since it was pretty hot, and my mother in law had a tent next to ours... we woke up to her saying ... shoo... shooo... she had a skunk that wandered up to her, and then came into our screened tent... waddling like he owned the place.  

We all laughed about it the next day... and I told my story about the trip to Holy Ghost...

I was always ready to camp out, if it meant that we got to go somewhere... and we didn't have money for a hotel... camping was the answer. We packed up the car  and took off…

 I took my nieces and nephew camping, sometimes for a week, sometimes only a weekend, we’d pack up the tent, food and take off. It was always fun, sometimes miserable, but there was always a story to tell... and my family's propensity for disaster followed us wherever we went...

Now, there is a story that I should interject here. It is of one of those camping trips with my sister’s kids that was rather normal for me… maybe not for other people.  

 We took off for the weekend, loaded down, this time in our car, since it was just a short trip, not too far from home. Kids had fun, until it started raining. It didn’t just rain, it poured. There were gullies where the water was running so hard. When we had  enough, we loaded up the tent, soggy food, and soggy kids, started up an incline and … POP!  I didn’t know what happened, but there was a hiss after the pop… and I figured if we weren’t going to blow up, we probably had a flat. My husband had a flat fixed with a plug, and the plug popped out, we had a flat.  Luckily, it wasn’t too hard to find the spare, but got soaked even more trying to get all the stuff out of the back of the car, on an incline, and we eventually let the car roll back down the hill as much as it would. Got terribly muddy and wet changing that tire… and got going again. Now, that would have been enough for me, but there is a God in heaven, and he has a sense of humor. I tried to take the least rutted road away from the lake but it was muddy and rutted no matter what road I was on. We had parked down a pretty steep incline, and even though there was a road that climbed out more gently, it had pretty deep ruts to one side. I took it, thinking I could ease our way up. Ha! Nearly to the top of the hill, there was a patch of really slick, mushy mud, the tires slipped in a what I can only describe as something akin to a roller coaster. Slip/slide/swoosh, we high centered on the very rut that I was so carefully avoiding.

After standing around, looking, wondering and generally crying… I decided that we were going to have to walk to town. I had hoped that we might find another camp and get help, but knowing the horrible rain the night before, I figured we were the only idiots out there… and I was right. Man, the lake was empty, literally empty. Not a soul around, for miles and miles, and here we were, four kids and a determined adult hiking. Muddy, wet, cranky but we had an adventure. We got down around the dam area and finally a vehicle came by, it was one of the caretakers from the water district. He stopped and gave us a ride, since I just couldn’t go back and work to get the car unstuck, I just wanted to go home and face my husband and tell him what happened. It could have been so much worse but it was not...