Whew! I'm back from a crazy week of camping. Almost a week, I should say. The trip originally was to be 10 days, and I lasted 8. It was a hot, hot time. Although we were in Massachusetts, it was during a heat wave during which heat records were being broken, and this was particularly challenging in a scrub pine forest with a lot of black asphalt down the front of the campsites. We had a great time nonetheless.

Our trip started with almost 12 hours in the car. We hit New York City, or the exterior of it, around 4:30 on a Friday, through no real fault of our own. So we decided to spend the night with our neighbors who recently moved to Madison Connecticut. I'll admit, whenever I get on the Merritt Parkway, I instantly have dreams of picking up everything and moving up there immediately. And Madison...what a dream of a little town. It's about 20 minutes out of New Haven, it's right on the Long Island Sound, it's directly adjacent to a lovely state park with a beach, and the town itself is straight from a movie or novel. It's the quintessential New England coastal town, with an adorable Main Street and shopping district, picturesque boats anchored all along the shore, houses so charming you'd swear they were a movie set, and we were there on the perfect day. Sunny, warm, pleasant for the beach but not too hot, Saturday. It was hard to imagine that anything but perfection ever is the case there. What I heard, however, is that before we came, there had been a month of nearly solid rain, so precious few beach days or outdoor activity days. Still...the place had its best foot forward when I was there and therefore will live in infamy (or just plain famy?) in my head as high on my I'd-move-there-if-I-won-the-lottery list.

For the next three days we camped. Notice my conspicuous lack of pictures. That's because Ollie dropped my camera at the Woods Hole Aquarium and broke it. So it's going to take a while to extract what little I had. We stayed at Myles Standish State Forest, right at the mouth of Cape Cod. It's a humongous park that takes about 20-30 minutes to drive across, and it is primarily scrub pine forest, dotted with about 6 ponds. It has me wondering what the difference is between a pond and a lake. Ponds are a very big thing in Massachusetts. I don't know that we label anything on a map of Virginia as a pond. The particular pond our campsite was near was called Charge Pond. It was relatively small--a strong swimmer could easily go across, but it had a cute little roped off swimming area (people were happily swimming all over, though) and a sandy beach, and the water was clear and felt incredible after sweating in the campground. What I found particularly nice was that there were trees around, and you could find a shady spot on the shore and there would be a magical little breeze and the temperature would drop by about 10 degrees when you sat there. The kids, especially Rutledge, found no end of fascination with this swimming hole. We were there for hours a day. Hours and hours. Throwing each other, throwing mud at each other despite numerous warnings, building tunnels through the sand, squeezing the sand until it oozed something that looked like blood, racing each other, knocking each other off rafts, spitting water out of their mouths. Then there were the nightly skit shows around the campfire. They would start out with canned skits of the Girl and Boy Scout type. But then the improv would start. Frances found a medium that was right up her alley. I felt like I needed a shepherd's crook to pull her off the stage after a while! She would spend half the day rounding up girls to participate in her skits and making up sequels to ones from the previous night. The skits these kids made up rarely made sense to adults, but they found them incredibly humorous.

On day 5 of the trip, we decided to go to my friend Nikki's house in Halifax for the night. I was about to have a heat stroke, or at the very least, to start vomiting from the heat. So we had the longest late lunch in the history of lunch at Friendly's and then we went to her house where we had a real dinner and slept in real beds. We were warned that if we went home, it would feel impossible to come back to camping, and sure enough, it was. Now it didn't help that it was 97 degrees the one day and about 95 the next and who knows how hot on the day I threw in the towel, but dealing with the camp stoves and sweltering tents was not a pleasant thought. When more record-breaking heat was expected, as well as two fronts coming from the west that promised some rain and a tropical storm coming up the coast that was supposed to wreck the ideal beach day, I determined that we would be wise to start heading home and try to compose ourselves before the school year starts in about a week or two.

Our trip home was long but somewhat leisurely. We stopped in Mystic, CT to have a look around, and we walked around a bit at Yale. Then we made one final push in the car to get to New Jersey for the night (ack--didn't get to the hotel until 10!). The next morning, we toured Princeton, got ourselves something to eat, and then headed for home, arriving around dinnertime. All in all, it was a great trip, we saw many new places, met some new people, caught up with old friends, and had a whole free weekend to unwind at home as the cherry on top.

Tomorrow is going to be our first day of schoolwork. The public schools don't go back for a little over 2 more weeks, but I'm ready for us to get on track, especially since we're going to South Carolina right after Labor Day. I don't feel completely organized in terms of location of items, but I have things laid out fairly well for at least tomorrow. I think it's going to be challenging combining that agenda with the summer that is still going on and its obligations, but I'm ready for a return to routine. Even if we're not running at full capacity right now, we'll at least be accomplishing something.