#107. or, no shirt, no shoes, no service

  A couple weekends back we had a family reunion/ camping weekend of sorts. The weather each day was fabulous while each night, thunder and lightening shook the skies while rain blasted down in threatening fashion. The noise of that, echoing about our camper through the 2 inch walls, keeping us from getting a decent nights sleep, was in a small part diminished by the knowledge that my uncle and his family were riding out these storms, a half dozen sites over in a tent. Each morning I half expected to find them washed away with only a trail of sleeping bags and camp supplies to lead us to where they were. But each morning, as I picked my way around the mud holes and soaked grass in my flip flops, they were always still there, in true resilient fashion.

 Come morning though, the sun was out once again to dry things out. It was beautiful.  I didn’t wear socks the whole time.  That’s something that’s become somewhat of a marker of the success of the weekend for me. While I don’t have the most attractive toes in the world, I’m certain they’ve seen more daylight in the 4 years or so I am, past 40, than all the years prior. I also spent some time with my shirt off and my fish belly white stomach leading me around the campground.  Now that I think about it, the older I get, the less clothes I wear, the more comfortable I seem to be. Considering how much time I spent in just shorts and flip flops, I’m thinking by the time I’m 55, I’m not even going to need to pack clothes to go camping for the weekend. Of course, even if you can man up and cook bacon on an open fire in the nude, chopping wood without any clothes on is giving me a rather unsettling mental picture.

  The worst part of the weekend was the lack of phone service. At any given time, you could spot someone wandering through the campground, cell phone in the air, staring at the screen, willing the number of service bars to climb high enough to push through all those emails, sitting somewhere in limbo until there was enough cell service to receive them. Well, OK, mostly me.

  All in all, I was a pretty awesome weekend. We sat around the campfire and talked about old times. My little, pre-teen cousins all giggled with school girl excitement (because they were ALL little school girls) when I got in line with them to get a glittery red, kissy-lips tattoo. I think that was some sort of unofficial  initiation into their club and I wore those lips with pride. We went for walks, and visited the lake, which happened to be one of the few salt water lakes in our province. I couldn't help but wonder if sharks would live in that lake. I played some ladder golf. That's a game where you toss a set of golf balls attached to either end of a cord onto a stand-up ladder affair for points. I desperately wanted to get the blue balls because, of course, there's an awesome joke in that. But alas, it never happened.

  We played a bit of a game of football. Old squad vs. the kids, and got our butts handed to us. It seems I'm not really the star receiver I imagine myself being. I also came home from that with a few bruises I didn't even discover until a couple days later. We probably would have won if i didn't have a bum shoulder. .......um ya, I'm going with that.

  Something else we discovered is that my aunts and uncles may still be too close to some of the stories that my grand-father started to actually believe they happened.

  Sunday morning, my mom and my uncle spent the morning in the camp kitchen cooking up pancakes, sausages and bacon for the whole crew. Which while wonderful of them, I know was a bit of a hellish job, as the sun beat down into the kitchen, the fire in the massive wood stove had to be roaring to keep the heat high enough to properly cook anything. Sort of a Hell's Kitchen, Camping Edition.

  ...............I was glad there was a big bottle of Baileys to add to the coffee while I sat in the shade and watched them. And bacon.....plenty of bacon.