August 10, 2005
Part the Second
On Monday morning I awoke amidst a mad flurry of activity and did my best to, y'know, not stand around and look useless. Sadly, I think Jen was even more useful than me, and she wasn't even going. Anyway, the camper was successfully loaded and most of us piled into that while a few piled into the car to follow us to The Lake.
Knowing, as I did, that a three-day sailing trip was in my near future, I had purchased motion-sickness pills (may cause drowsiness) and I decided that this might be a good time to try them out. So I did. And I slept all the way to The River. But wait! you say. What, then, was all this talk of The Lake? Well, the multitudinous subtleties of the plan for the trip had not yet trickled down the chain of command to reach my ears. We were going to spend a day at The River, a couple of hours down the road towards The Lake, and then depart early the next morning to travel the remaining few hours to The Lake, there to stay until Wednesday lunchtime.
So . . . we got to The River and ate lunch. And then most of us, except females above a certain age bracket, set out on an expedition. The general idea was to hike two miles or so out into the hills to a place where we could easily climb down to the river, then float back to camp. I talked Rachel into coming along, and both of us immediately regretted it.
She started whining approximately five steps out of camp and continued, quite literally without pause, until we reached the river. It didn't help that we missed the path and wound up walking an extra half mile or so. I suspect, judging from the state she was in when we reached the water, that she was in the early stages of heat stroke . . . expending extra breath and saliva on talking didn't help. But the cold water helped immensely.
We wandered lazily downstream . . . about half of it was deep enough to swim, and the other half consisted of rocks to clamber over, so it was fun, if exhausting. We found a few ledges to dive off of, and so forth. For all of our jumping about, I think Rachel was the only person who hurt herself. And she also didn't jump. Ironic. She slipped on a rock and scraped, scratched and bruised a sizable portion of her left side. Ouch.
Aside from such minor mishaps, we returned, tired but happy (again, except for Rachel) to camp and had steak and potatoes. Yum. And then I went to bed more or less when the sun did . . . I never do that. In fact, I should note that I went to bed and got up earlier all week than I have since, like, high school. It was crazy.
After breakfast early Tuesday morning (and getting yelled at multiple times by the neighbors because of all the noise) we departed for The Lake. I slept most of the way again. As a consequence of this, I have no idea whatsoever at all where this lake is, what it's called, how far we drove . . . nothing. It could have been in Idaho for all I know. It wasn't, but it could have been and I never would have known.
We spent a happy day at The Lake, swimming and chicken fighting and so forth. I got burned, as usual, but not too badly. And I read and napped. Not exciting to read about, perhaps, but relaxing to experience, certainly. After supper I talked Rachel into taking a walk. She spotted a concrete building not too far away and thought it might contain bathroom facilities superior to the port-a-potty variety, so we headed that way.
To make a long story short, apparent distances of lights at night can be very deceiving. Those lights were actually the entrance to the park, at least a mile and a half away. By the time we got there, it was pitch black. Happily, there was at least a bathroom there, so the search was not entirely for naught. What I had at first taken for some sort of line dancing convocation nearby turned out to be a small youth rally. That was kind of trippy. I was halfway tempted to join them, just to see what would happen, but I was pretty tired. And so we wound our slow and weary way back to the camper in the dark, with less trouble finding it than I feared (we were gone for over an hour, I think) and I collapsed, exhausted, into my cot.
Wednesday saw everyone braving the freezing temperatures of The Lake for an early morning swim. I passed. Once everyone else was dry, we set out once again, this time back the way we had come. I fell asleep. Again. Yes, I'm boring. Go away. We had lunch on a beach on the way home, and explored the finger of haphazardly piled boulders that jutted several hundred yards out into the water. And then we got home and began to prepare for the next expedition.
Stay tuned for part three of my thrilling visit to California, coming soon. Don't worry, I spend less time asleep after this.
Posted by Jared at August 10, 2005 11:59 PM | TrackBack