Our neighbors were going with us, but for various reasons, we left separately. Driving down I-85, I spotted their camper. After some brief conversation on the cell phone, we decided to follow them on their "short cut" to Stone Mountain Park. It's eight o'clock and still raining. It should only be about thirty minutes more drive time.
After stopping twice to get ourselves un-lost, I realize that the 15 year old boy is the one holding the map. I'm following a fifteen year old in the dark, in the rain, in a part of Atlanta I've never been before. At that point it hit me that I had no choice but to continue to follow them. That was not a happy moment.
A little after nine pm, we pull into the camping area. For those following my time line, that put us lost for at least half an hour. It's still raining. Cari and I sign up for a tent site and drive to find it. The children are getting cranky, we'll have to get this thing up quick. Cari and I hop out and open the trunk. "where's the tent?", I ask when I don't see it in front of me.
"um. . .", she started digging a bit. "It got packed first.", she told me.
After unloading our stuff from the trunk and pulling the tent out, we laid it on the flat part of our site.
I ran back to the car, "get out of the car, boy."
I stood Randy up on the picnic table and gave him the flashlight.
"I'm getting my clothes wet.", the boy said.
"Yeah, it's raining.", I assured him.
The tent up, sleeping bags and family inside, I looked at my watch. Ten o'clock. Still raining.
Welcome to Stone Mountain Park! The last thing Cari said before falling asleep was, "This is retarded."
The next morning, the sun showed itself. Randy
went picking up some kind of nut that was falling from the trees while we packed up. We were moving to share a site with our neighbors. Randy collected 100 nuts and for some dumb reason I allowed him to take his bag of nuts and store them in the car. The biggest mistake about this was that two days later worms started crawling out of these nuts and across the car floor. The nuts only lasted about five minutes after we realized they harbored nasty bugs.
1 comment:
The Mrs. agrees with Cari:
One night in the rain=stupid.
Two nights in the rain=insane.
Three nights in the rain=makes child support look good.
I *am* so glad I have boys, so I can at least do some proper camping before I can't anymore . . . they may complain about the rain, but I'm waaay bigger than they are.
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