Roughing It

We visited Southern Illinois to go camping and rock climbing over spring break.
And. camping. is. rough.
We had to gather all of this:

cram it into the 8-passenger Sienna,           find a nice, hard, flat spot to throw it on,

sleep in it,                                                  roll it back up,
     
stuff it back in…and drive 6 hours…again…with 1/2 of it piled on our laps,                   
unload it (while plugging our noses…sorry no picture),
wash it…and put it away. *big sigh*
ps. the weather was perfectly springy (75-ish, yeah!!)…but it was not a break (and in fact much harder than staying home) and my thoughtful, patient husband didn’t even say a word regarding our dramatically different packing styles (to my credit…we didn’t starve or run out of socks and undies, but to Brent’s credit…90% of the food I packed enjoyed the car ride both ways).
We endured/participated in many episodes of grouchitis and comforted lots of cases of the heebie-geebies.
But then I was thinking…without all that rough ‘n tough blood, sweat, and tears (and lots of pairs of stinky socks), 20 years from now we would never be able to gather around a cozy backyard fire, roast marshmallows, and say:
Remember the time when…
8 of us squeezed into our tent on a beautiful, clear night with the stars shining bright and the sounds of nature captivating us…including that hard-working woodpecker at 6 am
or when we passionately chased butterflies with Allison’s new pink butterfly net and only caught these two cute creatures:

or how we celebrated Allison’s 5th birthday at Giant City and when she bravely challenged the latrines on her own she happened to spy the only lizard in Illinois peeking its head underneath the latrine door…and as she staged an escape, it squirmed its little body all the way in, oblivious to the forever impression it made on an innocent little girl (Allison’s mostly over it, but Cienna keeps nervously rehashing her eye-witness details of the aftermath)
and that we discovered that people in our own state say, “Y’all” (meaning ‘all of us’—I think) and “Y’alls” (if referring to something we all jointly possess??…help me out on this one Texan friends…)
And when we watch the slideshows of old pics in 20 years (or next week), we’ll remember what it felt like to do this:

and see this: (a “wild” turtle)                 (all the black dots are thousands of tad poles)

and brush our teeth here:

And if we ever return…we’d probably want to re-live the part about how we climbed the water tower and watched the sun set behind the trees…