The First Annual Trent Family Camping Trip

I love living in a city. I love being able to ride my bike to work, or the store, or on a bike path that hugs the river bank. I love being able to talk to people simply by stepping out on my front porch. I really love having my house connected to electricity and the city's sewer and water systems.

But sometimes it is great to get away. In fact, my family is so confident that we will like getting away from the city at least once a year that we have decided to hold an annual Trent Family camping trip. We recently wrapped up year number one.

This first of many camping trips involved the following: myself, Nancy, Oliver, Dan, Cortney, Nolan, Margo (or perhaps Margot, either way she's Dan & Cortney's dog), Kaytlin (Cortney's sister), Adam, and Kira. Nancy, Oliver and I had scouted out a campground a few weeks before and deemed it fit to hold such a group of wingnuts and entertain us at the same time. The campground is called Rujada, is about 45 minutes from Eugene, and it is the poop (I wanted to use a different word here, but I promised a long time ago to keep it clean).

I learned two very important lessons.

1. I love camping.
2. If Dan is responsible for bringing something to the campground, make sure he actually brings it. See exhibit #1 below. It is me using the "coffee grinder." Yes, Dan was responsible for coffee.


He was also responsible for wood, didn't bring any, but more than made up for it. You see, Dan has a problem. He desperately needs to burn things, and he will stop at nothing to do so. No firewood would normally be a problem when meals for two days are planned with fire in mind. However, the Lord of Camping provided Dan with a thing called the woods. These woods were teeming with things like fallen trees, loose sticks, and moss (all of which ran the entire wet/dry spectrum). And Dan's "problem" passed quickly to Adam. The two of them spent virtually the entire time either (a) procuring burnable matter or (b) burning what they had just collected. Basically they were either in front of the fire or in the woods. Seriously, at one point Dan had a fire going at his camp even though the food was being prepared at ours. When I asked him why this was, he said, "Why not?" Why not indeed.

I must interject a small aside here. The funniest part of the entire trip was when I was standing around minding my own business, and suddenly Dan and Adam appeared from out of nowhere carrying a freaking tree. Actually, a tree is not an accurate description of what they were carrying, just what it looked like. What they actually had was an ecosystem. Adam tried to burn a part of it for hours, and even though the fire was nuclear around it, this log was more water than wood and caused a dead spot in the kiln. When I decided to investigate the rest of the tree, it fell apart in my hands and crawly things I've never seen before emerged from every crevice. But they grabbed it because, "you could just push it over." Good enough.

Anyway, back to Dan. Keep in mind he did all of his work with a small hatchet and a pruning saw. But Dan is a tireless worker, especially when there's an addiction to feed. So he'd have his gigantic piles of wood - the tiny sticks, the larger sticks, and the logs - all sorted out and ready to go at all times. The strange thing about Dan though is that if the flames drop below 10 feet high, he'll start adding wood. Or poking, but this tends to diminish the fire because Dan isn't actually good at working with a fire, he simply excels due to the sheer amount that he burns. But when he adds wood, he adds the sticks. In order to avoid a brain aneurysm, I usually busy myself elsewhere at this point. Besides, would you want to mess with this guy?


Back to lesson #1. I love camping. The woods are a peaceful and wonderful place to recharge the batteries and remind me that there's a lot of distracting noise in my life. Getting away from that noise has a remarkable centering effect. Plus, our campground has a creek that's perfect for swimming in or skipping rocks (which pleases Oliver as much as it does me), a 1.9 mile trail that is beautiful, and a bathroom with flushable toilets. And oh yeah, I sprayed myself with bug spray zero times, once for every mosquito bite I got. Eat your hearts out, non-Oregonians.

The best part of camping is not having to do ANYTHING! Everything is based around meals. Prep breakfast, cook it, clean up. Make a butt-load of coffee, consume, repeat. That's it! The next thing on the to-do list is lunch. That is a huge chunk of time to be filled with nothing, and I love it. Don't get me wrong, I love having a clean house and clean clothes and clean dishes and watered plants and cats that are fed and chickens that are fed and watered and grass that's less than two feet high and laundry that's put somewhere other than on my floor, but sometimes it's great to NOT DO THOSE THINGS for two days in a row. Whew.

At one point, I put Oliver down for a nap. I read him some stories, and snuggled him because he's cute and I love him very much (and he's soft and smells good), and I got a little tired. This feeling happens at home sometimes, and I'm usually roused by the need to go help Nancy do something. However, when camping this happens:


The best part? I will never know how long I was in there. It could've been 5 minutes or an hour, but it didn't matter.

Section 5 - Part I

Yeah, I know, two posts in one day. But I've decided to split Section 5 into two parts due to its length and subject matter. It's almost frightening how fast the story is starting to move, and my main fear is that the momentum will be difficult to maintain. But oh well, that's a problem I'm ready to tackle. How about you other authors? Are YOU getting ready, because this puppy is moving fast! (I won't hyperlink this whole thing for fun, just the word McBubbins).

Happy Reading!

Section 4

For those of you who aren't on Facebook, I temporarily forgot about you. Sorry about that. Section 4 of the story is up, and you can get to it by clicking anywhere in the body of this post (besides, I wanted to make the world's longest hyperlink). This section's author is Kira, and she is a very creative storyline developer. And prepare to meet Penelope, who is a GREAT character. The tunnels really start to open up, and the story is about to really start moving forward. Enjoy.

I Love to Write!

This blog has started something amazing, at least for me. I've discovered that I really, really like writing. A lot. I've had a lot of "hobbies" throughout my life, and I currently love music (see previous post), play both softball and basketball in leagues, watch movies and TV series on Netflix, and I even started playing Fantasy Baseball this year. But I have not felt so passionate about something as I have with writing since my attachments and desires were much less mature.

When I think about writing, the technical aspects that is, I am afraid. I am NOT a writer in any traditional sense. I took two writing classes in college, and a news-writing class (which is where most of what I know about proper sentence and paragraph structure comes from). That's it. Sure, I learned about business and memo writing at the U of O, but certainly nothing that would lead me to believe that I would be passionate about this endeavor. When I went back to school, I was going to be a math teacher, after all! And in the end I was a finance major. Something is not adding up.

I can spell pretty well, but I get confused as to when to use a colon or semicolon. I know that the comma or period goes before the closing of a quote, even though it looks wrong. But I don't think about adverbs and pronouns, or even adjectives. I just don't care about them. I use commas, but only to express how I want that sentence to sound, like the pauses in my head.

When I took a basic level writing class at community college, the teacher told me that maybe I should try a creative writing class because that would help me find my voice. Before her, I never heard one positive thing about my writing from any teacher I'd ever had. And even though she was telling me I was creative, all I heard was that I sounded generic. I never took a creative writing class, and I thought I'd be a journal writer at best for the rest of my life.

And then the blog idea came along. Mostly because I wasn't journaling, I had a new laptop, and I thought some of you may like knowing what Oliver was up to from time to time. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought it would turn into this. And by "this" I mean the level at which I would love it. Don't get me wrong, nothing else of great consequence has happened. I have a few confused "friends" on Facebook who think I actually won a Pulitzer, but alas I have not (yet!).

It is funny to contrast this post with an earlier one I wrote about fulfillment. At that point I thought that it was perhaps a career that I needed and I was wrong. It was simply something I love to do that I needed, and I have found it. The story that I'm writing with others may turn out to be slow, boring, sophmoric, juvenile, poorly done or all of the above, but I don't care at all! It is a thrilling ride for me to be on, and when it's done I will keep going. Because I have found my voice, and I don't plan on stifling it ever again. I can finally express myself without tripping over my words, or worrying what the other person is thinking.

I have found an outlet, and people are actually plugging in to it. Thank you to everyone who has encouraged me to write and don't care if I'm not "trained" to do it. Thank you for showing me that I don't need to be paid by something in order to love it fully. Thanks for taking a couple minutes, or many minutes, out of your day to care about what I've written. It is very flattering. Thank you.