The Countdown Continues

Eleven days to go and two don’t count. The high schoolers have their exams and the stress that goes with them. The middle schoolers are trying my patience. The younger kids are all trying to see what they can get away with and the tattling is driving me nuts!

We took the 6th graders to Selkirk Shores, a state park on Lake Ontario. I hadn’t been to this park since I was 7 or 8. Family vacations were always camping trips, mostly in the Adirondacks or the mountains of Vermont. We had an Apache popup and as far as my father was concerned the fewer people around the better. So my memories of Selkirk are still vivid several decades later. We took another family with us, the only time we did that. We camped in the sun, on a bluff overlooking the beach; my first time at a sandy beach. I was in awe of the lake, sure that my parents had made a wrong turn somewhere and we’d ended up at the ocean. My father hated every minute we were there but I was in heaven.
We spent the days running up and down the beach collecting driftwood. We talked to everyone. We met a family that offered to take us sailing. We got to stay in bathing suits most of the day and ran in and out of the waves. At the end of the week all of the driftwood collected by all of the kids was piled into a huge bonfire and everyone in the campground sat around singing and laughing. All these years later a beach is my first choice for a vacation.

It was nice to take a pleasant trip down memory lane.