We have been through FOUR stays in the last EIGHT days.
I can’t believe it’s only been a week since we were at the KOA of Mt. Lassen. Thinking about this blog last night, I kept noticing there was a theme of “Embrace the Slow”. Over and over again I found our pace to be slow going – with travel, with excursions, with hikes, etc, but then I look back over our calendar and see we’re blitzing through these stops!
For starters, we had four days at the Lassen/Shingletown KOA. Our first full day there was blogging/laundry day. The next day, I woke up with a very sketchy, sore back. Isn’t it awesome when something hurts for no reason at all? My first experience with a thrown-out back was when I worked at the Cannon Beach Conference Center at the ripe age of 19. I picked up a huge coil of hoses and threw them to the side – and that was the beginning of a painful relationship with my back. However often my back would go out, there was always a reason: I twisted while hunched over tying my son’s shoe, I didn’t lift with my legs, I was nine months pregnant, etc. But now? No reasons. None. Oh, did I just breathe in too deep? Back twinge. Whoops, I slept for nine hours instead of eight. Back’s out. “Wow, my back has been feeling good lately. I bet I can start running again.” False, back goes out just looking at a run route. The morning of September 28th was no different.
I’m keenly aware of that phrase ‘I woke up like this’, but I don’t think I get to embody the meaning behind it like it’s meant to be carried. It’s just my back. Lucky me. I woke up like this – with a twinge in my back that dares me to try and tie my own shoe. However, we had a really awesome hike planned for that day and maybe I just needed to “walk it off”.
The hike through Lassen Volcanic National Park was my first tally mark in the “embrace the slow” checklist last week. Thank you, me. My back didn’t appreciate the inclines, but particularly screamed at the declines. It was about three miles round trip, and the scenery was incredible. Despite my aching, I truly enjoyed taking in the views. The vast overviews of the Park and the mini version of Yellowstone’s “hot pots” at the turn around point were very cool.
The boys always give Jason and I a little grief when we tell them we made plans for the day, but once we’ve set out, they always enjoy it. In fact, in the midst of that first 3-mile hike, Cord was asking what the other hikes we planned had to offer as he be-bopped up and down the trail. Honestly, if I didn’t have to embrace the pain and slow our group’s pace down, I’ll bet we could have done two or three of the other smaller hikes that Lassen had to offer. But after getting to the car and sitting down to relieve my back, I knew I was done. Boys were ok with heading home, too. Hopefully we can get back there though because there’s a waterfall hike I’d love to do!
The last full day at the Mt. Lassen KOA was more of embracing the slow. It was rainy and cold, but during the rain gaps, we took advantage of all the amenities there.
We spent a lot of our down time at the playground where the boys dubbed the game “Air Square”. The two massive tree swings were pretty epic, too.
We woke up to more rain on travel day, Saturday. And since Cord and Bear discovered our ceiling was leaking through one of the gadgets on the roof the night before, we were quick to want to get out of the wetness.
In looking ahead, our next few stops were further south, and warmer – with no rain. I was ready to warm up and get back into the sunshine. The road to our next stop, a KOA in Coleville, was hindered by some road construction (embrace the slow), and some rather impressive elevation climbs and descents.
The Meadowcliff KOA is nestled right at the basin of a huge, rocky cliff. The boys’ excitement to climb the cliffs and rocks was quickly snuffed out when the check-in staff says there’s zero climbing allowed on any of the rocks. Major bummer. Staff also mentioned there’s no garbage cans around the campus, nor can we leave anything out at any time because there’s been a large number of bears and just as recently as 48 hours before we arrived, a mountain lion took a stroll through the campgrounds! Despite my best efforts, zero cougars or bears were spotted on that mighty cliff side. Meadowcliff also had a game room that we spent some time in.
They had a puzzle table! So while I helped the community puzzle get a little more completed, Jason and the boys played rounds and teams of foosball and shuffleboard.
The weather at the Coleville KOA was still cold and windy, but we avoided most of the rain we came from and Jason was able to put a fresh layer of sealant around the leaky culprit on the roof.
We were back on the road again on Monday, October 2nd, heading towards Boulder Creek RV Park in Lone Pine, CA. More vertical climbing in our precious Bae reaching high elevations and back down. More road construction gave us small delays, but the geography we were driving through was incredible. I come from the lush and green Pacific Northwest’s beauty, but the views from my window of these desert and high elevation tundras are breathtaking in their own right. Jason handled the drive and the slow climbs like a champ and we set up camp at our next destination.
At the Boulder Creek RV park, there was an unheated pool that the boys were crazy enough to get into, and I got some laundry done at their facilities.
There was also a small playground a couple parking rows away from us that the boys wanted to check out, so while Jason and I finished up with settling in, the boys set out for the playground. About an hour later, I hear Barrett running outside, “Come quick! Emergency! Ryan has fallen!” Not sure if there’s a quicker way to get me out the door than that. Rushing out to get to Ry, we see him almost back to our campsite holding his arm and stumbling with his walking. When I get to him, all the color is drained from his face and he’s telling us that he fell from the top of the monkey bars. (I guess since the boys couldn’t climb the cliffs at the last stop, they found another thing to climb on.) We attempted to get out of the boys what exactly happened, with the concern of a concussion from that high of fall.
Eventually, we were able to put three troubled boys’ stories together to figure out that Ry had been on the top side of the bars, went to dismount on the end, but when he swung down, his grip slipped, and he landed on his right side. Hard. With his right wrist breaking his fall. We got Ryan’s wrist iced, and we continued to check in with him to see about any other soreness now that the adrenaline was wearing down. I hate when my kids are hurt. At 5’9”, I can no longer bundle Ryan up and snuggle his tears away on my lap. After the intensity lessened, Ryan came out of the fall with a jammed wrist, scraped elbow, and a bruised hip. (Embrace the slow.) After a couple hours, Ryan confessed that the first thing he worried about was whether his hand would be too hurt to allow him to play video games at his top level. Don’t worry, his injuries did not, in fact, hinder his game play that night.
Our one full day in Lone Pine was filled with the sprawling boulders of the area. We took a quick drive, that ended up being longer due to the floods washing out the direct approach, to the Arch Loop Trail Hike. This hike is in the midst of the property of the City of Los Angeles where many movies have been filmed (Gladiator, anyone?). Now these rocks, crevices, walls, and boulders were open to be climbed. The boys happily obliged – even Ryan, though he wasn’t full steam ahead with his bum wrist reminding him how quickly a good climb can turn painful. The rocky terrain was so robust. Like we were The Flinstones living in Bed Rock (Remember that theme song? Me, too.)
The Arch Loop Trail was only about a half mile beginning to end, but since the trail wasn’t clear and seemed rather “optional”, we took our own varied ways through. I, however, would not go anywhere a snake would deem appropriate to hide out. I stayed out in the wide open. Those snakes can have their creepy holes and shady bushes.
The next morning, we were packing up again and hitting the road for another few hours down the line towards Death Valley. Unfortunately, the flooding has taken out our direct path to where Jason wanted us to go, so we took an alternate route. As Jason said mid-route, we would not take that route again.
Our last couple migrations we’ve done have taken us up and down some serious elevation, and our ol’ RV, Bae, is not in it to make any speed records already. But get her packed to the gills with a family of five and almost everything they own, hitch a 4,000lb car to the back of her, and through her at the bottom of a few 5,000ft elevation changes and she’ll down right scream at you. Not only were the climbs dropping our speeds to under 15mph, the switchbacks, and narrow roads gave us reasons to contemplate life’s choices. Jason said, as we were dipping through another set of curves with no guardrails or even a mile post to slow us down before falling off the side, “I think they used our rig to pave this road.” That scary excuse for a road was no wider from line to line that our Bae is from tire to tire. And just when we thought it couldn’t get any skinnier, the road became ONE LANE through to towering cliffs – with curves. Visibility to see another car coming from the other way wasn’t possible. Our expected three-hour journey easily became five. (Embrace the slow.) By miracle alone, we are parked where we are now – at Space Station RV Park just on the outskirts of Death Valley.
Although the trip was much longer than it would have been in almost any other rig than ours, we still arrived at this RV park mid-afternoon. Like the few RV parks before this, we’re only here for two nights. Since we came in early, Jason found an AWESOME ghost town for us to check out called Rhyolite only about 10 minutes from us. That place is so cool. It’s always surreal to me to be able to walk through these old towns to see and feel the history of them. Rhyolite was a mining town. In the matter of 15 years (1905-1920) the town was established, built, hit with the financial downfall in the aftermath of the California earthquake, and abandoned. 8,000 people to 14. The records show the school building wasn’t even fully completed before the townspeople were jumping ship!
There’s a 3-story (plus a basement) cement and rebar building that housed a bank, post office, and top-tier offices on the top two floors. Although two-thirds of the building has collapsed over time, the façade is still there, and it’s impressive. Says it cost $90,000 to build. Gold was king back then. We also stopped off and saw the Red Light District’s dance hall and brothel (disguised as a “residence building”) where over half of the town’s women worked (though if asked, they were piano teachers). We walked around the town’s jail – which had four cells that didn’t turn out to be enough to house the criminals in Rhyolite and neighboring towns. Oh, and the bottle house! A man spent three years building a two-room house entirely of glass bottles! He would pay the children 10 cents a barrel full to round up the bottles for him. Turns out, he was building it to auction it off. The auction price ended up putting him about 500 bucks in the hole after it was all said and done. But from a gal that loves a good project, building a house from bottles and mud is a pretty spectacular feat!
Also within the small limits of Rhyolite, was a new brimming population of townsfolk. Without exaggerating, but taking a wag at it, I’d say my family saw about 8,381 caterpillars on the grounds of Rhyolite. Honestly, they were EVERYWHERE. Take four steps, and you could count ten future-butterflies from where you stood. These were beefy bugs, too. Not cute, little guys. Big, launch at your toes, thorns on their butts bugs. We saw our first one and thought, “Oh wow, that’s cool!”, but by the end, we were wondering if we had entered a hostile takeover. So. Many. Caterpillars. I guess I need to be grateful it was caterpillars we couldn’t get away from, and not the rattlesnakes that the danger signs kept warning us about.
To give me some time to concentrate on my blog, Jason took our three boys rock hounding. I am excited to see the treasures they found on their excursion and hear about the town of Goldfield where they’re stopping for insider information along the way. I’m also grateful for the quiet. I guess I’m getting the hang of this “Embrace the Slow” mentality.
So here’s to slow on foot, slow on wheels, and fast through stops!
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