Lemonade Out Of Lemons

You know how people ask you "Where are you going on vacation this summer?"
My answer this year was always the same. "Yosemite!" I was soooo excited. We had just bought a new toyhauler and I had visions of lowering the back, having the breeze bounce off half dome and into my trailer bringing with it the smell of mountain wildflowers. I'd wave to hikers going by and pet little baby bears on the head while my husband wrestled with their mother. Ah. These were my visions of vacation. It was going to be perfect.

Before we left, I had asked Noah's mother what to expect of the drive up there since she'd just gone.
"Will it be green and lush?"
"It would be pretty dry until Fresno, dry in Fresno, then it starts to get pretty."
"Okay." I thought, translating that. "I can make it till Fresno before the great views show up." That's what Ipods are for, right?

Wrong. We drove and drove and drove and as we stared at the dead, dry landscape, I watched the "miles to Fresno" slowly shrink. "We're getting there!" Although the landscape wasn't much, we did enjoy all the acres of grapevines and fruit trees and as Fresno came and went, I rubbed my hands together in anticipation and I blew an imaginary kiss to half dome. Yosemite, here we come!

Between studying the CA map and the roadsigns, it suddenly occurred to me that our campground was mere miles away. 30 miles to go. Then 20, then 10. I continued to study the dry landscape. There were hardly any mountains and very few green trees. "Wow," I said to my husband. "That Yosemite just jumps right out at ya." As I scanned the hills for signs of half dome, I spotted another sign...we were almost there! With a puzzle in my brow, I stared at the map.

As we pulled off the highway into our campsite, we simply stared. I almost started crying. Our families got out of the cars and with mouths ajar, we studied our surrounding--then we started sweating and wiping our brows (another theme of the week). It was dry, dead and brown. No flowers. Hardly any trees.

Where were all the bears? The cabins? The hikers? "Mom," I said, afraid to hear the answer. "Where's Yosemite?" That's when we learned that due to road construction it would be another 3 and a half hours to the valley floor (that's just one way...and with a car full of toddlers). Are you kidding me? Had we really just driven nearly ten hours to camp for a week in a fire hazard?

So, with slow, sad movements, we mopped the sweat from our brows and started to set up camp. That's when we saw a girl walk by in a bathing suit. We followed her damp trail to the end of the campground only to find that a cool, clear creek flowed through the place. As quickly as we could, we threw on our suits and sank into the water. The kids played and splashed and we finally found relief from the hot campground. We didn't dry off for a week.

By the end of our vacation, my children had turned into fish and us adults had invented a game called "water soccer". With hockey-sized goals made out of bent willow, a ball and a half-dozen willing people, we proceeded to kick and splash each other until we were soaked and exhausted. With a few bruised ankles and one broken toe, we had more fun playing water soccer.

And my favorite memory, was one night when my mom, my aunt and I decided to play scrabble. It was one of those games where nothing was going right. You know the game when one player has all the Q's with no U (of course), another has all the vowels and another has all the consonants--with championship quality words like "put" and "hi" we were not getting anywhere. So being the scrabble enthusiasts and rule followers that we were, we decided to invent our own version of the game. There were only two rules: You could only use the letters sitting in your little wooden church pew & the word could NOT be found in the dictionary but must be accompanied with its corresponding definition :) Here's what we came up with:

JELON: (Jay-lawn) a Jello dish from France
TMTRY: (Tem-etry) a form of math, much harder than Trig (of course!)
ZOOO: (pronounced just as it sounds) a VERY LARGE zoo
BAOM: (Bay-om) Emeril's "Bam", but with a southern accent
ZEAD: A man from the old testament
GLAVT: A horse from the Lord of The Rings
my mom came up with the word ECNS and on my turn, I added a few letters making it QECNSOUX which of course made it French. It had to be the most fun we'd ever had playing scrabble.

Needless to say, there wasn't a whole lot that went the way we had planned that week, but all we could do was roll up our sleeves, have a laugh and make the best of it and by bending our expectations, we found out that we ended up having a lot of fun. It will be a vacation we never forget!