Spring Break

We enjoyed a trip to California this spring break, visiting Grandma and meeting a new nephew. We did not have a cold winter on the East Coast, just a long grey one. The sunny skies and mild temperatures (plus the smell of orange blossoms) out West were most welcome! The kids jumped in Grandma’s unheated pool without a second thought. They are teenagers though and opted for plenty of warm up time in the hot tub and on the pool deck in the sun. By happy coincidence, friends were traveling through the area when we were there. Their elementary school aged kids also jumped in and stayed in much longer than ours, completely oblivious to the cold but clued into the fun.

We drove up into Sequoia National Park, hiking a bit on the Lady Bug Trail, an old favorite. I remember driving up there when we were waiting for Tori to be born, wondering belatedly if it really was that smart to be a couple hours away from the hospital. Phil and I took the kids up there to the camp ground during all those summers when we would come back after the school year in Hong Kong. It was one of our kids’ first camp sites. They all remembered jumping in the ice-cold river, fed by melting snow (this seems to be a theme of ours). The road, unpaved for the last few miles up to the campsite/trail, was longer and bumpier than I remembered but perhaps that was because we were in a rented sedan. We all breathed a sigh of relief when we made it back to pavement this year and I remember the exact same sigh when I made the trip, pregnant.

After doing familiar things with family and friends, we headed to the great unknown- college. We (parents) were a little anxious, but our college goer was not. She ran into a girl she knew from Hong Kong. Even I ran into someone I knew from Hong Kong and discovered her son is an incoming freshman as well. We toured the campus, walked through one of the libraries, hit a college coffee shop and generally felt better. Then we went to a lecture were the professor was talking about the correlation between police force numbers and crimes. Suddenly, we weren’t feeling better, so we left and walked through the quad again, gazing at Gothic architecture until we felt better again.

Where was Adam during all this? On his own adventure. For the second year in a row, he headed to Sea Base with the boy scouts. This year the trip included a week stay on an island. The boys rowed boats out to an uninhabited island and stayed there, building shelters, fishing and cooking. All was great until their flight home was cancelled due to extreme weather. Options were few and the scout leaders bravely rented vans and drove the boys home, over the next few days. They put in a lot of hours and got everyone home safely. While I felt very sorry for the men driving, I did think that cancelled flights was a real survival skill. Adam called us many times during the event, checking different flights and airports from his phone. He may use that skill more than shelter building in the years ahead but who really knows.