After spending the night in the Norman Bates Motel version of RV parks, we hit the road early in the morning, to go back to where good honest, middle-middle class people park their shiny pick-ups and RV’s. We met the same park ranger as we had seen the night before there, a Mrs. M. Johnson, and asked her the best way to get set up with a good spot. She let us know that she was very sympathetic towards us and if we would just come back at 12:30, she would make a special effort on our behalf, but there was simply nothing to be done until after 12:00, 12:30 being even better.
We killed a few hours by me carrying everyone though the poison ivy, (I’m not allergic, at least yet –more on this later? -I hope not), fording the beautiful Jack Fork River several times, and the kids lugging many pounds of precious, beautiful rocks around. (I told them they could fill up the back of the pick-up with rocks for all I cared, but I wasn’t gonna tote them around, since I was already hauling all the water and Stuart on my back) Then we showed back up at 12:30 or a few minutes before to talk to the very helpful Mrs. Ranger M. Johnson, but couldn’t find a ranger anywhere.
We drove around every campsite for about an hour, then just parked the stupid truck in a spot marked “reserved”, and went swim
ming. I came back and unhooked, and went ranger-cruising. Luckily, I bumped into one pretty soon, and asked for Mrs. Ranger M. Johnson. He looked at me like I was stupid and said “She gets off at noon, hasn’t worked a Sunday afternoon for the last 8 years. Lucky gal, cause she gets to go to all them there horseshoe tournaments instead of me.” So much for sympathetic park rangers, but this guy was helpful enough, if a little bitter at Mrs. Ranger M. Johnson for hogging all the horseshoe tournaments, and before we knew it, we wer
e set up and had the grill going.
We killed a few hours by me carrying everyone though the poison ivy, (I’m not allergic, at least yet –more on this later? -I hope not), fording the beautiful Jack Fork River several times, and the kids lugging many pounds of precious, beautiful rocks around. (I told them they could fill up the back of the pick-up with rocks for all I cared, but I wasn’t gonna tote them around, since I was already hauling all the water and Stuart on my back) Then we showed back up at 12:30 or a few minutes before to talk to the very helpful Mrs. Ranger M. Johnson, but couldn’t find a ranger anywhere.
We drove around every campsite for about an hour, then just parked the stupid truck in a spot marked “reserved”, and went swim
ming. I came back and unhooked, and went ranger-cruising. Luckily, I bumped into one pretty soon, and asked for Mrs. Ranger M. Johnson. He looked at me like I was stupid and said “She gets off at noon, hasn’t worked a Sunday afternoon for the last 8 years. Lucky gal, cause she gets to go to all them there horseshoe tournaments instead of me.” So much for sympathetic park rangers, but this guy was helpful enough, if a little bitter at Mrs. Ranger M. Johnson for hogging all the horseshoe tournaments, and before we knew it, we wer
e set up and had the grill going.Our swimming hole was a really sweet spot, complete with a little cliff to jump off of. We had a good time there, except just as I noticed that I only had 3 kids within 100 yards of me, I looked around and saw Grace waaaay downstream and as I yelled at her to come back I noticed her braids disappeared, then again. Then she started screaming/gurgling… For the sake of over-writing long boring blogs, tune in next time!
1 comment:
I can hardly wait for the next exciting installment! And although it certainly is a shame that you had to leave behind the wonderful live music from your first campsite, I'm glad you were still content with the second one. :-)
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