Come listen to my tale of woe.

Allow me to tell you the sad tale of how we ended up camping 10 minutes from our house at Green Canyon for 2 nights this weekend. Not that Green Canyon is a bad place, but it's just a little too close to home. I prefer going somewhere more exotic if I'm going to do all the work to get packed up for a camping trip. Know what I mean?

We had been invited by Jaime and Tyler, planners of great adventures, to a weekend at Flaming Gorge with all kinds of fun people. We are driving to Bellingham next week, so I was apprehensive about the long-ish drive with the kids this weekend, and then a suuuuper long drive next weekend. But Jason convinced me that we really should go. We needed to buy bike racks, a rocket box, DVD players, etc, which we would need on our trip to Washington as well, so we thought it would be a good idea to get all that stuff in order.

Well. On his way home from the Summer OR show in SLC Wednesday night, Jason was surprised when he lost cruise control, air conditioning and turbo in the Volvo all at once. Jules thought it must surely be a fuse. So the next morning, Thursday, which was our planned departure date, Jason messed with all the fuses in the car trying to determine which ones might be causing the trouble. He fixed it somehow, but fuses are a leetle confusing in the Volvo, so he's not really sure how he did it. But lo and behold, everything worked like a champ. So we made all necessary purchases (including some fun ones like lanyard lace and beads for the kids), and packed up the car. Jason had to make a couple of trips to Al's to get parts for the racks, but FINALLY, at 5:00, we were ready to go. We loaded the kids in, turned on movies for them, and rolled out of the driveway. First stop: gas station. Turns out this was our last stop as well, because when Jason hit the button which opens up the gas tank, nothing happened. We tried everything, to no avail. We could not put gas in the car. We looked at each other for a second, not sure if we should laugh or cry. Really.

We drove back home and messed around, trying to figure out how to over-ride the system, talking to the Volvo dealer, looking online... no luck. By 7:30, we had to decide what we would do. Transfer everything over to the LandCruiser, and continue to our destination, arriving very late? Leave in the morning and stay just one night? Drive somewhere close and camp? Would we find a campsite on the holiday weekend? Would we have further electrical problems with the car? Should we drive the car off a cliff?

By 8:00, things were grim, very grim. Everyone was so hungry and tired! We ended up driving up to Green Canyon, eating stew from a can, and crashing in our tents. Everyone slept like rocks. Well, except me, because I was sleeping on rocks with no mattress. The next day, we left, came home and showered, went swimming at the pool for most of the day, showered again, bought a sleeping pad for me, and went back up to camp for a second night. This time we had a "wild rumpus" as Jason called it. We played cards, painted rocks, sang songs, ate hot dogs and s'mores, and then the 2 littlest kids had a major meltdown. It was harder to get everyone to sleep that night. Fortunately, the kids slept soundly, while Jason and I did NOT.

Apparently there was a massive party going on further up the canyon, and ALL NIGHT people were passing by our tent talking right out loud, having a great time. OH. And I should mention that this party was actually a DRUM CIRCLE. Yeah. Very restful. I would have been into that about 4 kids ago. We did wake up to a beer can left on our picnic table, which was nice. All in all, I'm done camping for the year.

But look! Finn had fun eating dirt.