Home again

I was barely out of bed this morning when Eric reminded me that I hadn't updated the blog. When I asked if someone was waiting for me to do it, he said, "Yeah! Me!" Not sure why; he knows what's going on in my life.

The rendezvous was fun but very wet. We set up camp mid-day Monday, and Monday night it started raining. It continued on and off until Thursday; we definitely got our share of April showers, and we won't be there to see the May flowers. We did see a lot of friends, though, and I got to prove to my Florida rendezvous friends that Eric really does exist! They all asked where Dad was, and were surprised when I told them he had a conflict and that we were camping sans parents AND kids. That part was nice, not having to be accountable to anyone but each other for the first time in 18 years. The kids did fine without us. In fact, I was a little offended that they did so well without me!


'Someone' was concerned that we wouldn't be able to haul our stuff in the van without a trailer or a shell on top. This is the van in the driveway before we started, and everything is inside (even poles) with room to spare.


Here's my 'dandy'. He's cute and he cooks!


Pisa has its Leaning Tower; Georgia had a Leaning Shower. Incidentally, that's entirely home made. We ordered the ropes and stakes; everything else came from Lowe's. Well, almost. We bought a shower bag (not shown) at the BX, and the grommets for the canvas came from Michael's. Eric put it together after only having seen Dad's shower once. How it didn't end up going down the hill is beyond me. The back stakes were barely hanging on, thanks to the wind and rain.


Mr. Aflac was our neighbor to the west. We were tucked back out of the way at the north end of camp, and the view was lovely. Even with all the rain, it was a nice second honeymoon site.



This is looking south at the west side of camp. That's probably a third of the camps, including about half of Trader's Row.



It was chilly. I bought the cloak in Florida; the voyageurs cap was picked up the day before.



This would be a darn-near perfect 'period' photo except that I didn't think to take off my modern glasses. At the very least I should get extra credit for posting of picture of myself in which I'm wearing no make-up.
We were fuller going home than coming in, but we still got everything, including poles, inside the van. I will confess, though, that when we stopped for the night in Chattanooga we took the poles out and strapped them to the top so we could see out the back.

Total tear-down time was about two hours, and we weren't as minimalist as I thought we'd be. It all fit in rather compactly, but spread out and set up I still felt like we had too much stuff. We've already taken notes about what we want to do better next time. Note to me: The notes are in the Moleskine notebook. The big one.