Spring Break is Over

It's back to the grindstone this week after living it up last week. On Thursday morning, we met up with two other RV family friends at K-Mart parking lot. This time, I was the one that got the message about the meet time so no one could mess with me- 9:00 a.m. Last summer, Will and the boys told me it was a half hour earlier than the actual time to ease the tension Will feels about not always being 15 minutes early. It was the first time we were ever first! We were neither first or last on Thursday, just right. We were joined later in the day by my baby brother Doug and his family, making four families in all.

We went to Mt. Hood Village, an RV resort near Zigzag (where we traditionally go for pizza on Friday night). It was chilly and rainy, but Will can overcome that. He rigged up some tarps on our awning that were the envy of all our camping partners. (I can't believe I failed to get a picture of the finished structure!) The ample supply of multi-purpose ball bunjee cords he has were quietly coveted by everyone else. Once the tarps were neatly in place, we gathered around the propane heater and felt like we were really roughing it, safe from the blowing rain. The last evening it was nice enough to have a big outdoor fire.

The place has a big lodge with an indoor pool, hot tub, pingpong tables, pool table, and big screen TV. The kids didn't run out of things to do. They even shot hoops outside a few times between showers. We adults did grown up things, such as visiting, ham radioing, finessing the ham stick, improving the tarps, reading, taking walks, and most importantly, game playing. Will is notorious for his enthusiastic participation in games. Our friends had the electronic version of Guestures, and we were warned that the word would be visible to the opposing team after it was guessed so we could be sure the correct word was acted out, because apparently the father in that particular family has occasionally misread the word. During Will's first turn, he marvellously acted out "chocolate" - the look of ecstacy on his face as he ate the the invisible chocolate bar he had just unwrapped was inspiring. Unfortunately, after we guessed correctly, we learned he should have been acting out "calculate". It was also worth playing the game to watch him act out "flirt". We even stopped laughing long enough to eventually guess correctly.
Here you see Will improving his "ham stick" one evening. (Notice the head flashlight he is wearing. For some reason, people love to make fun of that. Although one person who made fun of it after the last camping trip showed up wearing a new and improved version of it.) He was never satisfied with the ham stick's performance compared to the dipole, on which earlier in the week he had conversed with someone in Japan! I wondered how they were able to communicate. He tried to tell me that the radio waves are able to translate languages, but I'm pretty sure the truth is that the Japanese person spoke English.

So now the fun is over for awhile. But life is full of little surprises. Like when I sat down at the computer today, there were six pieces of chocolate that look like they came from someone's Christmas stocking. Score! Now there are three pieces!