Month: August 2017

For the second year in a row, I fell into a fit of temporary insanity and decided to take my children camping at Moran State Park in the San Juan Islands. With a group of other moms and their kids.

And the insanity must have been more intense than usual because I decided to organize the dang trip this year as well. This was probably the most stressful part of the trip. It was really hard to get a firm “yes” or “no” out of people. Even up until the last few days before departure, I had a few yesses, a few nos, and an overwhelming wave of “oh, gee, I don’t know, maybe, keepmeintheloopI’mveryinterested.”

As a person who builds her comfort out of giant slabs of Planning Ahead, this was maddeningly stressful. But I get the reluctance. I think camping — even car camping — is intimidating to a lot of people. Yes, I’ll admit that it’s a headache to pack all of the stuff. But I’ve discovered that group camping with other women is really wonderful. We took turns preparing dinners and breakfasts, which makes packing easier (it’s far easier to plan for one big meal for 20 people than six meals for five people).

 

Our kids never claimed boredom, since there were always a pack of other kids to roam the forest with.

But best of all — adult convo! All the time! We’d tuck the kids in their tents and talk around the campfire, we’d chat while hiking, we’d converse while the kids splashed in the water — it was the best!

Once again, we stayed at the coveted group camping area at Moran State Park. It has its own bathroom with flush toilets. Fancy.

It also has no next-door neighbors, so kids can roam and play without bothering other campers, and we also have a nice sense of privacy. This year I also made use of the coin-operated showers in another part of the park. Many blessings on my teenagers, who were able to look after Will and Kate while I snuck off to get clean. (Ha — I think they were still asleep when I came back.)

We spent time splashing at the little swimming beach at the lake (and eating divine peach ice cream from the Lopez Island Creamery).

Another morning was spent hiking to a waterfall. I loved watching the kids swarm over the rocks to explore the water.

We took a different hike to a saltwater beach for lunch.

Evenings were spent toasting marshmallows and watching for bats to emerge from the sky. (So many bats! We loved counting them all.)

The next morning I had to head back early to get Jeff to the high school for Freshman Orientation Day. (Sigh, I wished I’d known about this conflict before I made the campsite reservation.) So we struck camp early (I hereby congratulate myself for correctly figuring out how to fold the tent back up into its infuriatingly tiny bag) and headed off to the top of Mt. Constitution to explore the lookout tower.

It was early enough that we pretty much had the place to ourselves. Which was great, but it also meant that we were so early that the ice cream stand hadn’t opened yet. Have no fear — we made sure to stop at the swimming beach on our way out of the park to get our cones. Dang, that peach ice cream is the best. My mouth is watering just thinking about it now.

Looking forward to 2018, I realize that our summer schedule won’t allow for this camping trip again — our school district is shifting the school year forward, so we will have a very short summer, and I’ve also come to realize that the two weeks before the start of school will likely be stuffed with cross country practices and “back to business” days.

Sigh. Maybe we can convince Brian to come along for a weekend some time. We’ll see. Glad I could take the opportunity for this adventure while I could.

 

Otherwise known as “what happens when we finally clean the playroom so people actually want to play there again”

In May of 2012 I trundled my family down to southern Utah to see an annular eclipse. It was a fun experience, but what really got me excited was knowing that is was just a prelude to a full solar eclipse that was predicted to occur in August 2017.

“There’s going to be a solar eclipse just after my fortieth birthday!” I remember telling my mother-in-law, Kathryn. “I want to find the perfect viewing location and have all my family there!” I said this more as wish — I knew that coordinating plans with extended family was always tricky.

“Oh, gee, who knows where I’ll be then?” was her response.

“You don’t know where you’re going to be five years from now?” I replied.

And Kathryn was struck silent for a moment, mostly from the shock of realizing that Brian and I were only five years away from 40.

“I’m flattered that you still mentally think I’m in my 20s,” I teased.

But the funny thing is that after five years of waiting and nervous anticipation, I got what I wished for — and it wasn’t even something I planned.

Brian and I didn’t initially plan to spend any time in Utah this summer — it was supposed to be the trip to Glacier, and nothing else — but then we ended up going to Utah anyway. (Such is the pull of the grandparents.)

Brian and I had made reservations at a hotel in Oregon just outside the eclipse path, so our plan was to drive straight from Utah to Oregon, see the eclipse, then drive home. None of our parents really had eclipse plans at all.

But then my dad revealed that all employees of LDS Welfare Services were invited to camp on one of the stake farms in eastern Idaho that happened to lie in the path of totality. My parents decided to wake up early on the 21st and drive up. Wouldn’t we like to join them?

At first, Brian and I decided to keep Idaho as a backup plan, but then decided to cancel the Oregon reservations. Eastern Idaho was chosen by NASA to be one of the best eclipse viewing locations in the country. Why would we want to go anywhere else?

Then Randy and Kathryn decided to go to Idaho as well (they stayed with some distant cousins the evening before the eclipse). Why not invite them to join us on the farm, too?

So even though I had given up on my birthday wish, it happened anyway.

The farm was one dedicated to growing wheat, but there was a pasture that was used for YW summer camps. We woke up in the middle of the night and drove to beat the traffic (turns out that the traffic predictions were overblown). We stopped at a gas station in Pocatello, ID and found it filled with excited eclipse-chasers from all over the country (we met people from Minnesota and Texas).

There weren’t many people at the farm. A group of BYU students had camped there overnight, and they invited us to eat breakfast with them. Brian, who had been driving all morning long (and would be driving to Seattle afterwards) crashed for a few hours on an inflatable mattress my parents had put in the back of their SUV.

We were all a little jittery, waiting for the eclipse to start. I spent time knitting more squares for a blanket I planned to donate to refugees, and my mom read some of the stories from her Neil Gaiman Norse Myths anthology.

Finally, it began — a little tiny bite taken out of the sun. William, Eleanor, and Katie began jumping up and down and cheering. We immediately began trying out all the eclipse experiments we’d read about (or done before with the annular eclipse).

As the time for totality drew near, everyone in the camp drove out into the wheat fields and up on top of a ridge where sat some farm equipment and water tanks. It provided a marvellously unhindered view of the entire 360-degree horizon. The light began to grow dim and metallic, just as with the annular eclipse, and soon our shadows began to warp.

Suddenly the light went from dim to dusk, very suddenly . . . it reminded me of someone turning down a dimmer switch for an electric light. And then . . . totality! None of my pictures — or any of the published photos I saw of this event — truly captured what it looked like. The moon seemed enormous in the sky. William and I started jumping up and down and squealing “oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh!” Brian came over and kissed me. Jeffrey did the same thing. We saw the shadow snakes on the poster board I brought.

The sky was the most beautiful shade of indigo, and the moon looked flat, like a smooth-sided coin or a button over the sun, with a thick band of light radiating from its edge – -starlight writ large. The entire horizon became sunset; with the rolling wheat field horizon it looked uncanny, like cover art from a 60s sci-fi paperback.

Katie came to me for some reason, and I knelt down next to her and asked her questions about what she saw. “Look, just look look look,” I urged her, hoping that it would be something she’d remember her whole life.

When the sun began to reemerge, I understood why people called that moment the “diamond ring” of an eclipse — in the split second before slipping my eclipse glasses back on, one edge of the moon held a burst of the most pure white light I’ve ever seen in my life. Both Brian and I remarked about it on the drive home.

Speaking of which . . . as soon as totality was over (the dimmer switch brough the lights back on, and the temperature rose again) Brian hustled us straight back to the car for the drive home. We had to get all the way back to Seattle that day, and he was anxious to avoid traffic! But truthfully, Idaho invested so much resources into traffic management that we didn’t have any problems until we hit road construction in Montana. (And then more road construction in Snoqualmie Pass, ugh. We didn’t get home until midnight, but overall wasn’t as bad as we’d feared.)

Jeff stayed with my parents; he’d been invited to stay a week with friends in Ogden, then fly home as an unaccompanied minor.  So it was just the five of us for the drive home.

For the first hour of the drive, we kept gazing at the sun with our eclipse glasses on, watching the “bite” grow smaller and smaller until the sun was a whole circle again. Out of all my kids, William was the most enthralled by the experience, his whole little body vibrating with excitement. After a few minutes in the car, he begged for paper and pens, and then began to draw pictures of the eclipse, trying to process it all. I don’t blame him. I haven’t fully processed it myself, and I’m not sure I want to. Even though I know every single scientific explanation for what happens during totality, I want to preserve some element of mystery. Kings of old were struck dead from eclipses. Part of me should keep that same kind of awesome wonder.

Sometime during the breakfast at the camp, someone remarked to Randy that he was impressed that my kids had both sets of grandparents together for the eclipse. “Of course,” Randy replied. “We’re a celestial family.”

Midway through the year we discovered that Brian would need to be on service over the holidays, and so we wouldn’t be able to visit family between Christmas and New Year’s.

So, we decided to use the vacation time on a second surprise vacation to Utah! Here are the highlights:

That evening we headed back up to West Point to get ready for the end of our Utah adventure — watching the total solar eclipse in Eastern Idaho! More on that in the next post.

During the first two weeks of August . . .