The Work of Relaxation

The camping trip, the camping trip. I mentioned to a few people that we were going on another one of our camping trips and now everybody wants to know how it went. Did I make it sound like it was going to be memorable?

I promised someone that my photos would make it seem like they had been there too. Whoa! Where did I get that kind of confidence? And it's so not true. I censor my own photos to such an extent that you get a different, but not entirely wrong, impression of the truth. It's a skill.

This is the point where I intended to upload a photo but due to some technical problem, it seems I'm unable. This happens frequently and it really bugs me. Could it be me?

So the thing that made this camping trip different was that we (we?) invited 4 other friends to join Sam, Steve, Brad and myself for the weekend. And it couldn't have turned out better. We had two adjacent campsites each with a picnic table and fire pit. One of the tables was situated in the center of a ring of redwoods. That's where we set up the gazebo and main cooking and dining area. The gazebo keeps stuff from falling on the food and, in sunnier campsites, keeps us shaded. On the other end at our campsite we used the fire pit for after dinner socializing and S'more making. This time we remembered to take a broom and so I went about sweeping all around the tables and even made a path between the redwoods going between the two sites. Of course our plastic pink flamingos were there to show the way!

The best part of the trip, for me, was the long stroll on Saturday afternoon on a trail that goes down to and along the stream. We'd camped there one other time a few years ago and I've been kicking myself ever since because I didn't take my video camera. So I was happy this time to find that it was as beautiful as I remembered and took quite a few still photos with my digital camera.

At the bottom of the trail when you first reach the stream, there's a wide bend where people were out playing and swimming with their kids. I watched for a while and then noticed a group of ducks in the shadows of the ferns who seemed to be trying to swim upstream but were a little wary of the humans in their path. A few minutes after I started walking along the path I heard a lot of flapping and splashing and turned to see the ducks going upstream like they'd lit a rocket. I managed to snap a couple of photos as they disappeared around the bend.

I also enjoyed watching a red dragonfly take off from its perch over the water, do a figure 8 recon flight over the stream and return to the same perch. I watched it do this same routine over and over again. It was too far away to get a good closeup shot but I tried. Later I found a small blue dragonfly on a rock in the middle of the water and snapped his photo too, discovering after getting home that there was a fly on the rock too.

I was gone so long that I missed lunch. But that wasn't an issue for me because we'd eaten a big breakfast, something I don't usually do. The thing about camping is you have to start dinner early or you end up eating, cleaning up and doing dishes in the dark. "Quiet Time" is usually 10PM and I'm a real bitch when it comes to conforming to that rule. When I want to go to bed, I want it quiet so I insist that if people are going to be up past 10PM that they be extremely quiet, just for common courtesy. I've been known to shout at people who make too much noise, even total strangers.

The hardest thing about camping, for me, is the work involved with packing up, unpacking, and setting up all in the same day and doing the same in reverse on the going home day. Maybe that's why I haven't written about the trip until now. I was still tired from the work of relaxation.