Suddenly, Summer is Over

Vacation was the star on the horizon to which I fixed my gaze, and now it is over, and D is back in school, Keith will go back Monday, and SUMMER IS OVER.

Keith became Master of the One Match Campfire on this trip.

I made pancakes and they were good.

The girls spent all of their time in the River.

First Day of Seventh Grade

I walk down Kingwood Street to work every morning and when Dawn and the Mimosa Blooms all come together I know it is summer.  Unfortunately for me, most of my sunrises this year were obscured by rain clouds - I'm not complaining, I have a bounty of Spaceship Squash and Tomatoes because of the rain.  But I am a little disappointed, because I am a hot weather girl, and I had about 4 weeks this summer of weather that was warm enough for me not to wear a sweater.  This week, when I started back after our hiatus, it was no longer light out on my walk to work, and the Mimosa showed me her gigantic seed pods, and the last hurrah of her freaky pink blooms, and I could smell the stale beer/vomit odor that heralds the return of the WVU students, and I knew... SUMMER IS OVER.

Technically it doesn't end till the autumnal equinox, but practically, in this town at least, all sense of ease and peace that the long warm days conveyed has evaporated in a haze of pot smoke and booze fumes and Hummer exhaust.  As I walked home this afternoon, some new resident of Clark Street stood on his porch, chucking beer bottles from the night before in the general direction of the trash cans sitting on the sidewalk, sometimes making it, sometimes hitting the concrete with a resounding shattering of glass.  The little old man in my soul wanted to holler, "you know the city has curbside recycling, right? Put those bottles in the GREEN CAN MARKED RECYCLABLES!" But I said nothing, mostly because I do not trust myself to have a civil conversation with a kid who drives a car more expensive than my house, but also leaves broken glass all over the sidewalk.  I walked on home, past the newly broken window of the AstroVan at the corner of Cherry and Clark - The owner is a customer at the shop, he has a little kid, he put cardboard over the window till he can afford to get it replaced.  It rains almost every day here... SUMMER IS OVER

I made a new necklace with fishing line and some beads.

It has been a rough summer for me, in my brain - maybe I could go get my meds adjusted but I think I need to go hike more instead.  My kid is asserting her independence beautifully, although she mostly speaks to me in monosyllables and when I touch her things she yells "No!" at me as if I were a dog.  When I sit on the couch next to her to watch TV, she turns off her show and goes upstairs.  I just offered to make pancakes for breakfast and she went into the kitchen and made herself a bowl of cereal.  She does well in school and everyone says she is polite and kind and a pleasure to be around but I feel like I have failed somehow in the only job I ever had that was really important. This summer felt like the Universe saying to me "you are not Mother Material, You got one and she survived, but in spite of you, You do not deserve another."  That's how it felt.  But now SUMMER IS OVER and there has to be peace in there somewhere if I can just accept it.

Three is a Magic Number

Scenes from Horseshoe National Recreation Area

During this camping trip, Delia expressly forbid me to put any photographs or video of her up on the internet.  This is a huge stumbling block for me.   I don't want to violate her privacy, but my job here is to record and share family memories, and she happens to be a huge part of the family!  Alas, it's probably the reason why there are relatively few MommyBloggers with children over the age of 8. 

Still hoping to strike a compromise with her.  If anyone has a suggestion, or has had to navigate these waters with an older kid, please, comments are welcome. 

Camping, Part 3

We went through 3 bundles of firewood. Making a fire is an essential ritual when we go camping, and we had very little trouble with it this trip, as it didn't rain and we had plenty of dry wood. Menu planning wasn't seriously considered, I only packed a couple cans of beans, some stew, one package of weenies and trail rations. We roasted weenies for every meal except lunch on our big hike day. Next time, I am going to bring some vegetables!

Carson gave us a Coleman campstove, and man, was it way more convenient for making coffee! Nothing compares to camp coffee, even if it does look an awful lot like mud.

I got a bit of knitting done, it was relaxing. But I ran out of yarn before I finished, so I unraveled my would-be hat, wound it into a ball, and started again. Next time I am bringing more than one ball of yarn too.

All you need is a campfire and a can of beans, or in our case on Sunday night, a can of beef stew.

I can't wait to go back out into the woods. Delia has consented to camp out at Tygart Lake sometime at the end of June, so I guess I'll have to wait till then. Happy Trails!

Kumbrabow State Park

Kumbrabow is in the heart of West Virginia, about a hundred miles south of Morgantown. We took the Scenic Route, Route 250, through Grafton, past Philippi, and then Rt 33 to Elkins, where we stopped for lunch at Hardees. Neither one of us had eaten at a Hardees in maybe 6 years, so the guilt was not too much to eat a hamburger and onion rings. And boy howdy, were those onion rings good! Big slices of real onion batter dipped and fried crispy right then, we had to wait 5 whole minutes, but they were some of the best onion rings I've ever eaten. Not just because we were starving either.

From Elkins we took Rt 219 South and then 15 West through some seriously fragrant farm country. Alfalfa smells good. Cattle farms don't smell quite so good. They're not nearly as smelly as the chicken farms on Rt 33 outside of Harrisonburg VA, but I was very happy to turn onto the Kumbrabow road and get away from the smell of immature compost.

The road into the park is long, windy, and mostly unpaved. Stretches of the forest along this road were so dense that it looked like they were harboring leftover pockets of night. We encountered a turkey vulture just sitting in the road, who was rather leisurely about getting out of our way. I watched him disappear into the woods and noticed the steep drop off along the edge. What at first glance seemed to be mildly sloping forest hillside was in fact just the tops of trees maybe 50 feet tall, growing up from way down the steep incline. I thought of my Mom and how she wouldn't like that little one lane road AT ALL. Seven miles and fifteen minutes later we found the campground.

If you visit Kumbrabow's Mill Creek Campground, we recommend site #8. It was shady most of the day and had a nice place down over the hill for our tent, granting us supreme privacy. (It was, after all, our romantic 13th anniversary getaway.) We had reserved site #10 on the phone, sight unseen, and once we got there we found it to be open, flat, without any understory, right next to the water pump and Mill Creek trailhead, and blisteringly sunny. So we walked around and noticed #8 was empty, and the supremely nice ranger said we could switch.

Our little tent down over the hill.

I can also recommend sites 4&5 which offer plenty of understory, good creek access and are connected by a cute little path in case you want to camp out with some pals, but not share too awful much. They are also near the outhouses. Sites 11 and 13 were large, with sun and shade, and each had little mini trails behind them going into delightful ferny landscapes.

The fern-filled glade behind campsite 11.

Mill Creek is shallow around the campground, perfect for playing in, and evidently home to some native trout. We witnessed a man teaching a boy about Delia's age to fly fish, and I was tempted to sit and watch them like I would watch any other wildlife, because it was really interesting and beautiful. The same kids splashed around in the creek and then rode their bikes around the campground all weekend. Keith and I missed Delia a lot, but even though she probably would have enjoyed the water and the sweet playground, the park has one fatal flaw (in her eyes). No running water.

Mill Creek

The park does have a bath house, with very nice flush toilets and coin operated showers, but it is at the Forest Office which is some four miles from the campground. We got our water from a hand pump. It was soft and delicious, almost as sweet as the well water I remember from my childhood. I didn't mind drawing the water, but we should have brought a camp sink and maybe something larger than two 1 liter canteens.

Sweet Water Pump

The outhouses were very nice, clean, provisioned with TP and perfectly normal toilet seats, and not at all stinky. The echo made it feel kind of like peeing into a well. A cool breeze greeted my bare bum every time I sat down, and I never quite got used to that.

Coming soon... Hiking Meat Box Run!

First Campout of the Summer

Sunday morning after everyone got up and got moving, I said, "hey, why don't we go to Audra!" So the gears started turning and by 1PM the car was packed with our camping gear and we were on the road. It is really easy to get to Audra from Morgantown, just hop onto Rt119 and drive till you get to Audra road. It took about an hour and a half including a stop at Sheetz in Phillipi to grab some juice and sandwiches. We spent about $20 in provisions and another $18 for the campsite. Add in money for gas and firewood and you have an action adventure trip for about $50, and you can't beat that with a stick!

Rolling into the park felt like coming home to me. It was so lush and green and cool, Middle Fork sparkling and splashing off to the right. We drove through the campground till we found a nice site right on the riverbank. It was the first time we camped by the water, usually we pick a more secluded spot on the other side, but Delia really wanted to have a nice view of the water from her tent window, so Keith acquiesced to our request.


Keith and Delia set up her tent, and then she and I went into the water, leaving him to start the campfire.
I got three or four pictures and then my camera told me that the memory card was full. Bummer! But we still had a wonderful time. Delia is growing more sure of herself, and she was willing to go much farther out into the water than I thought she would. We got halfway out into the river, the water was about two feet deep and the current was fairly strong, I was afraid we'd get knocked over! So we retreated a bit and just played among the rocks. It was a lot of fun.

About an hour later as we returned to camp, I noticed that Keith was still messing about with the fire, he hadn't gotten it going yet. Delia said she would distract him so I could get it going, but I think he was onto our plan from the very start. I did manage to get a few flames going, but the wood was damp. Only by kneeling in front of the fire and blowing on the coals till I was lightheaded could I get any flames at all. It was like that all night, we never did achieve a roaring blaze, but we did get enough heat to roast not-dogs and make smores!

I want to send out a HUGE Thank You to Delia's Uncle John, who told her that spiders don't like the scent of oranges. She was armed with an orange on her first trip to the bath house, and saw no spiders. So I guess it worked! Now her main camping complaint has been overcome, and she's decided that she can stand to go camping more than once a year. YAY Uncle John! You are our HERO!

Anyway, after a stress free trip to the showers to rinse off all the river grit, we retired for the night to the soothing sounds of the water rushing over rocks.

The next morning, we tried in vain to get the fire going. I decided to let Keith have at it and I went to retrieve a Red Bull from the cooler (I brought them for just this reason, it takes us FOREVER to get that first pot of coffee going). That was when I discovered THE COOLER WAS GONE. We'd left it by the picnic table, just like we've done every time we've gone camping in the past, and someone must've come through during the night and carried it off. So breakfast went from turkey bacon and eggs and fried green tomatos to granola bars and slightly soggy graham crackers, and Keith was so mad smoke was coming out of his ears. He set off around the campground to see if he could find our cooler, and though he found that approximately 12 other campers had blue and white coolers, none were ours. He also found another empty cooler in an empty campsite, which we thought might have been put there by the Night Thieves, but it wasn't ours. Keith suspects the culprits might have been the same ones who decorated the men's bathhouse with toilet paper during the night. Keith and the Park Ranger woke the Superintendent, who was super nice - he apologised profusely and said they usually don't have that kind of trouble at the park. He said he really couldn't do anything but take our phone # and call us if they found our cooler. I was not really worried about the cooler, I was more upset that someone stole my daughter's breakfast.

We decided not to attempt a big hike, since it is no good to trek out into the wild woods on a mostly empty stomach. Campers two sites down had left a blazing fire in their grate when they packed it up, so we usurped it to make a pot of coffee. At least we got to have Campfire Coffee (although the bastards stole my MILK). We left Audra around 11 in fairly good moods, and got a bit of lunch at the Sheetz in Philippi. Gotta love Sheetz, a life saving bastion of sandwich goodness in the wilderness of NorthCentral WV.

Oh, and on the way back to Rt 119, I had to swerve into the other lane to avoid hitting the biggest turtle I'd ever seen. The thing was almost as bigh as a basketball! I pulled over and made Keith go pick it up and take it to the side of the road. Turns out that the turtle did not appreciate the assistance. Keith said it almost bit his finger off! When he finally got it off the road, the turtle turned around and hissed at him! How's that for gratitude! On top of that, the turtle left some terrible smell on Keith's hands. Baby wipes did nothing to remove the odor, so Keith rode all the way to Philippi with both hands out the car window.


Since we did not get to go for our big hike, Delia and I did an exercise video after supper. Neither one of us evidently has very much abdominal strength, the Australian Public Television video ladies kicked our butts! But we'll keep at it, a little bit every day!