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Most of the Chino summer adventures have been happening far away from the Chino House. In June, Cole went to discipleship camp with Taido and 80 other middle school students. Mary Polly went to Chicago with my mom to visit my sister and her family. Then she was home for one day before leaving to go on the College Backpacking Trip with Taido. Soon after Mary Polly arrived home from her mountain adventure, Cole flew out to spend a week with my sister’s family at Castaway Club, a Young Life camp in Minnesota where my brother-in-law was speaking for the month. Meanwhile, Ben headed to Kentucky with Taido on the high school mission trip.
We were finally all reunited in the Smoky Mountains for our first extended family camping trip in five years. Seventeen of us huddled in the rain under my daddy’s “magic tarp.” Whitney is currently posting pictures of this rainy adventure, so I’ll share the treasures Taido brought home from Mary Polly’s first backpacking adventure.
My daddy has been leading backpacking trips for longer than I’ve been alive. Of course, Taido is equally passionate about the mountains, which has always made for a strong bond between the two of them. Cole got to go on this trip several years ago and I was nervous about whether or not he would be up to the task. Carrying your gear uphill every day for a week can be pretty rigorous. He had a great week with his dad and Grandpapa though, so I was very excited for Mary Polly to get to have her turn.
Still I was anxious for her, especially for “peak day,” the day the campers wake up before dark to climb to the top of a fourteen thousand foot mountain. It’s a huge accomplishment in my book, and I will never forget the first time I stood on top of my first “fourteener.” I was 15.
Mary Polly will be 10 next week, and the first time we got to talk to my dad he said she was climbing like a mountain goat. I love these pictures where she seems like she is right at home on the trail.
She looks a little tired in the next one. She is actually on the top of Mount Blanca. Woohoo!
This next one is a shot of the view from the camp at which they spent most of their time. Looking at these pictures makes me wish I had gone.
The tent in the background is the little two-man tent Taido bought for he and Mary Polly to sleep in on the trip. That man never misses an opportunity to acquire a new piece of gear!
Of course there are always a few overachievers who have to grab a second peak. Mary Polly skipped out on the second peak day, while Taido, Daddy and a few others climbed Little Bear.
This climb is looking a little more technical to me.
From the top of Little Bear, you can see the camp by the lake. So far away…
My husband and my daddy! I love these men!
The climbers who wanted more! All these guys climbed Little Bear.
Above is the view of Blanca from Little Bear. This picture of Mary Polly and her daddy makes me feel like this is a memory she will treasure forever and ever. I’m so grateful that she got to be a part of such a significant experience.
There were just a few brave gals on the trip. I was thankful for each one of them!
Little Bear under a rainbow.
One of my favorite things to do at a Young Life camp is to shop. Crazy I know? But usually they open their little camp store for us during an afternoon and I rush over and try to look at every little thing, because in addition to the fact that there is not a cooler t-shirt in the world than a Young Life shirt (except maybe this one), they also have begun to stock just generally awesome products. Sweet water bottles. Bandanas in every possible color. Leather necklaces with silver peace signs. The space in a Young Life camp shop is a little slice of oooh…come over here right now and look at this!
Everyone is rushing around and trying on shirts. We’re all, oh I love that one! I am thinking about that one for so-and-so. Do you think he’ll like it? They are so famous for their shirts that Daddy handed me a twenty in the parking lot before I left so I could pick one up for him.
Last year my favorite find were these sleek journals. They are filled with great quotes, and they seem to cry out to be tossed in your satchel and written in. I wanted all of them, but managed to leave with just two. One for a journey and one for a birthday gift for a friend. This year I bought a bag that I absolutely love instead of a t-shirt. I have been carrying it since we got back and it just feels like summer to me. (Of course, I know it’s not summer yet. Just trying to get over the blizzard by pretending.)
Several of us also passed some time in front of a card display that brought us to tears. I don’t usually buy cards. I make them or write on an index card or a gift tag. And if I do buy cards, I don’t make a habit of paying $3 for a one. For $3, I should be getting a package of 10 cards.
Friends, these cards were so great that I left that store with four of them. I might have been a little under the influence of shopping with friends. Always a bit hazardous. But ohhh, these cards! They are so great. I found them online so you can understand how great.
Though you can view the cards online, you cannot beat a real live in-person visit to a Young Life Camp Store with your friends. The memories around that one purchase will cause you to hold on to that shirt even after it is long past its wearable stage.
Here’s Mary Polly wearing the shirt I bought her the last time I was in this same camp store. Five years ago. Even though it has a couple of little holes in it, I’m saving it for Simon to wear. I’m sentimental like that.
On Friday morning, after it snowed all night at camp, I was pretty sure we were not going anywhere. Even as we loaded up the cars and knocked the deep deep powder off of them, I thought really…we are going to be sitting back by the fire in our cabins before long. Then we actually started down the mountain. Not 50 yards down the driveway, we stopped. We were all lined up behind a large van piled with teenagers and skis pulling a trailer loaded down with luggage. My husband was at the wheel of that precarious vehicle and I kept envisioning it going off the side of the mountain as we slipped in the snow in our rather small minivan.
Later in the day, after the hanging off the edge of the cliff was all over and my stomach had settled from its terrified state into the post-terror phase of irritably angry, I said to my beloved husband, I love it that you aren’t afraid to get down the mountain even when the situation looks grim. It’s great that you aren’t held back by fear. I just want you to appreciate my fear that your willingness to always push on can sometimes translate into foolishness.
We talked about fear this week. A huge advantage to being a member of the FC (as opposed to the LSD) was that we heard Frog and Toad stories every night, presented to us by our own dear friends, the dramatic and the dude. The night that Frog and Toad faced their fears, we named out loud the beasts that make us afraid. The dark, spiders, dying, even snails. Mine is heights. Though I have reached a lot of them with my crazy family, I still get this little flip flop in my stomach near a cliff or on a chair lift without a guard rail. Frog shared the verse with us in Joshua that reminds us that we need not fear anything on this earth. Our God is with us. Have courage.
aren't they cute?
One of the kids among us recited this verse each night. Still, though, I forget it. Sometimes life is hurling in a direction I am not sure that I want to go. I want everyone to stop so we can just think about it a little more. Consider the options. Maybe there is a way out of driving this van down this particular mountain right this minute.
After we braved the snowy roads, the lack of heat/defroster in my car and the grouch within me, I had a beautiful sunny afternoon of skiing at Copper Mountain. Mary Polly and Ben skied their first black diamond. Ben asked me to take his picture on a mogul. We road speedy chairlifts with maps on the guard rails. We wore ourselves out on the long runs. And when we were dead dog tired and it was time to make out way back to the vans, I was trudging through the village carrying my second load of skis when I saw this sign in a store window. It made me laugh.
It’s not necessarily that Taido faces fear better than me. Maybe it just has more to do with the pace he keeps. No time for thinking.
However, I’m pretty sure if it had been up to me to get that van down the mountain, we would still be at Frontier Ranch.
I rode up and back to Colorado with my dear friend, Donna Hall, her son Tony, my three older kiddos and one Alex Heffington. There was some switching around of the kids here and there, but we always had at least seven in my little red chevy venture. In honor of the fact that today is her birthday, I thought I would share a short list of things that Donna and I learned together over the last week. I’m sure that many others can add to this list. Youth trips to Colorado are never, ever boring.
- The renegade run, Pinball, is still alive and well at Monarch.
- It will not be long before all of our kids ski or snowboard better and faster than both of us.
- Trees are kind of hard. You should try not to hit them with your body.
- Eleven and twelve year old boys can wash dishes in an industrial kitchen. (Umm, I am pretty sure that means they can do it at home, too!)
- Lower No Name is such a great run that it is worth sliding down Upper No Name on your rear to get to it. The fact that it is preceded only by steep black diamond runs might also explain why no one else was on it.
- Never assume that snowy, mountainous roads means that you are snowed in. In fact, I am pretty sure that “snowed in” is a relative term.
- Taido Chino only supplies information on a need-to-know basis. And he is completely unaware of how much Donna and I need to know.
- If the heat is out in your car, you can place a piece of cardboard in front of your radiator to force the heat of the engine back up into the car.
- Random, thoughtless solutions to clear the windshield should be first tested in one small corner on the right side of the windshield just in case they happen to backfire, further obstructing the vision of the driver.
- Toxic de-icer is not meant to be sprayed on the inside of your car. However, if you do spray it on the inside in a desperate attempt to see through your windshield, you won’t die. At least not immediately.
- If you blow the fuse to the TV in your car by plugging in a hair dryer in a futile attempt to defrost the windshield, the five children in your car will make it home without the TV. It won’t be pretty. And you might have to hand out tickets, but they will live.
- You can keep these five children from fighting for quite some time playing Karaoke with an iPod. Until there is an altercation over lyrics.
- All the correct words to Viva la Vida are just a phone call away. Cavalry instead of Catholic? Who knew?
- The speed limit in Kansas is 70mph.
- Carrots are by far the best driving food. The crunch keeps you awake.
- If you are tired of fast food, you can go to WalMart and buy a rotisserie chicken, pita chips, goat cheese and blackberries.
- Making extra food the week before a trip to Colorado is not a bad idea. You never know when you might be held up by a blizzard!
Taido and I fell into bed at 2am after the last kid had been shuttled home from Snowcamp ‘09. Epic as always. Our spring break adventures just keep getting better. Hopefully I won’t forget all the stories while I’m working my way out from under this pile.
Very soon I will be loading myself and the three older Chinos up in a church parking lot teeming with high school students saying gruff goodbyes to parents, while we kiss our baby goodbye. We will drive all night long and wake up in the mountains. When I think about this soon-to-be-experienced moment of arriving, I can be a little more calm about the monumental task of getting ready to go. Of course, my job of finding gloves and hats is nothing compared to the organizing and finalizing and fund-raising and calling, calling, calling that our fearless trip leaders have had to do this week, and will be doing right up until the very last minute. Most folks never see the amount of planning and praying and begging that goes into one of these grand adventures.
This year I am particularly excited about how many students we are taking on their very first trip to Colorado. Lots of first time snowboarders and skiers. For some, it will be their first time to see mountains. And for a few, their first time to leave Arkansas. There is a strange sort of welling up to tears inside me when I think about a fifteen year old laying his eyes on the Rockies for the first time in his life. I wonder if it will get into his system the way it has entered the hearts of so many I love. Will he always remember how he encountered God in the heights of the snow-covered peaks? Will he return year after year to seek the same peace in his soul? To calm the storm that rages after a year of difficult times at home or the constant pressure of school?
The mountains make me younger. I don’t remember everything from school, but my heart holds my yearly treks to Colorado more tightly than maybe anything else from those days. Technicolor intact movie memories. As soon as I pop my boots into those skis, I am smiling and sixteen again. (In fact, when I was skiing might have been the only time I was smiling when I was sixteen.) Not until I feel my quads burning after a few runs, do I remember how many years I have on these legs.
A fun addition this year is that a family camp is running alongside the high school trip. Separately, but in the same camp. Our paths will cross on the slopes and in the dining hall.
Oh sweet friends! This week we will stand up and slide down, fall and begin again. We will laugh hard and maybe cry harder. We will sing and eat and live and love. Maybe even fight. We will have to work things out. And when we come home we will see it in each other’s eyes that we have done this thing together. Shared experience. Remember when is the stuff of true community. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
ok…internet access and cell phone service has been scarce, as in not at all, so i am posting quickly everything i have written in parking lots and in the shotgun seat of the BMV while we are at a nasty taco place in rawlins, wyoming, which happens to have free wi-fi. hopefully i will become better at this (as in more coherent and succinct) as we go, but for the sake of time, here’s my first update of the chino house on the road.
Saturday May 24, 2008
REI Parking Lot
Denver, CO
Our last week at home was crazy but wonderful. I really had no idea the kind of response that our leaving for the summer would initiate in the folks with whom we normally do life. We were showered with all kinds of love and blessing as we said our goodbyes. Laden with treasures for the road, we headed home from saying goodbye while our babies spent their last night at their grandparents. I frantically finished packing and cleaning when we got home at nearly 10pm, and so it wasn’t until I sat down near 1am to read a couple of verses and breathe a thankful sigh to my Maker that I realized how incredibly honorably we had been treated over the last several days. All of a sudden it completely overwhelmed me. Not just the homemade cookies and energy bars. Not just the books, games, puzzles or even the “happy trails” banner to hang in our summer home. Or the money for gas or gift cards for the road. Or the details like Whitney showing up with a red bucket after she knew I had searched and searched for one for my own little wannabe member of the Mysterious Benedict Society. As I reflected on the “shower” we’d been given in our last days at home, it was how much we had been loved that hit me. That people actually care that we are going away. I guess I hadn’t thought about it that much. It’s not like we’re not coming back. The summers usually fly by so quickly that I have really thought that people would hardly notice we were gone. But I think God knew that somehow this outpouring of affection would be the wings we would fly out of town on and will carry us through our lonelier days. Through any doubts and darkness ahead.
I walked through our empty house one last time before I finally fell into bed. I could feel that lump in my throat swelling up as I put away the last of the clean clothes that weren’t going with us. I closed all the closets and turned off all the lights. But when I started to feel like I might sit down and cry, I drew from the lasting warmth of our evening and I just felt fuzzy instead of sad. I worried for a minute that our taking this big adventure and having so many blaring needs in light of that adventure (a need for a camper or for lots of watching Simon while preparing to leave came to mind) was putting us unnecessarily at the center of everyone’s attention. I never want anyone to feel obligated to make a big fuss over me. But I tried to let that go in the wake of how grateful I felt (and still feel) for whatever circumstances have allowed me to see how much we are loved by this community we call home. And in their eyes, a glimpse of the depth of the love that God has for me.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Riding shotgun from Rocky Mountain National Park to the Grand Tetons
Our first few days on the road have been nothing if not eventful. It is now amusing to me that I left Arkansas desperately in need of a good night’s sleep after the last couple of weeks of lying in bed at night and thinking of all the things I still needed to do or pack. (Why didn’t I get up right then and pack the whisk and the potato peeler?) I thought that I would just sleep and sleep when my head finally hit that pillow in our sweet rig. Well, let’s just say that we are in the phase of the journey that I would call “working out the kinks.” We knew our first night was going to be a crapshoot. Come on. We were driving all the way to Denver on our first day and then hoping to roll into a state park around 10pm on Friday of Memorial Weekend and find a place open to camp. Somewhere on the road in Kansas we started calling parks and realized that, ahem, they were all going to be full. It was going to be so late when we rolled into Denver that we decided we should just pull into a KOA on the outskirts since they actually had spots. After hearing that all the parks were full, I was grateful to find an open spot, never mind that it was RIGHT in between two other rigs like our own and very dark when we were pulling out the pop up for the first time, while many others watched from their cozy RVs and chuckled, “Hey, look at the rookies!” I kept chanting grateful phrases in my head as I listened to the semis roll by on the highway as I tried to fall asleep, freezing cold and with Simon bundled up between Taido and me. I thought about all the people praying for us. I thought about how we had found ourselves in Kansas in a rain and hailstorm so heavy that I began to pray out loud that Taido could see (instead of screaming at him to pull over). I was praying with my eyes closed (because the only thing worse than driving through a storm in which you can’t see out the front windshield is watching someone else do it) and Cole said, “Hey Mom! Dad can see!” I opened my eyes and it was truly as though God had parted the storms for us. There was darkness to our left and right, and ominous clouds behind us, but streaks of light poured down on the road just ahead of us. We had clear roads the rest of our way, dodging bad weather all around us. As we drove, I could almost hear my Grandmother’s prayers for good weather for traveling and for safety for our family. I knew that she was probably watching the weather even at that moment. When we stopped for dinner, the gas station attendants were warning people not to drive east for the next hour because of tornadoes. It was then that we realized the extent of the protection we had received. And so, somehow the cold and the loud noise of the highway, however annoying, seemed small in comparison to the fact that here we were in Colorado, all six Chinos together in our little provided shelter. I also chuckled as I remembered Ben getting out of the van and saying to me as Taido was putting up the camper in the dark in what is essentially a glorified parking lot, “Hey Mom, should we go hunting for some stuff for our scratchbook?” He has been very excited about this darling scrapbook that Jerusalem gave us that has little bags in it to put your treasures from the road. Ben has been dying to put something in the “scratchbook,” as he calls it, almost as much as he is dying to spend every dime of his money before we even get to Vancouver. I told him he could take only two dollars into a gas station in Kansas and that he didn’t have to spend it. He came out with a magnet of Oklahoma (because we did drive through Oklahoma) that was $1.99 and when I asked him how he paid for the tax with only two dollars he said, “Well, I’m a kid and sometimes people, you know, they just let little kids.” Little optimist.
The next day we rolled into Denver for some Einstein’s Bagels, a stop at Whole Foods, a stop at REI (of course!) to get Ben a new sleeping bag because his toddler bag is being passed down to Simon and a new rain shelter for our Kelty Carrier. Then we ate lunch at Tokyo Joe’s in Boulder before we headed to Rocky Mountain National Park. Strangely, in all our trips to Colorado, neither Taido nor I have ever been there. It is different from the other areas we camp in Colorado in its appeal to international tourists. It still has the majestic beauty of Colorado in full and because animals are protected from hunting and the park only just opened to campers this weekend, we saw lots of wildlife. The kids were shouting from their seats and pointing out the windows (even Simon) at all the elk and deer. Is there anything more beautiful than a deer? I will never tire of seeing them. We also saw mountain goats and wild turkeys, rolling down the windows to hear them gobble at one another. We hiked to Alberta Falls on a snow covered trail. Simon’s favorite thing might have been the Park Shuttle which runs through the park on the weekends and is free, so you don’t have to use your own gas driving the mountain roads. Also, you can be dropped off at a trailhead and then picked up from another one. Simon was just ecstatic to ride on someone’s lap instead of in a car seat.
Two of the three eastern campgrounds were full when we arrived, and the pass to the western campgrounds was still closed due to snow, so we were grateful to get one of the last available spots at Glacier Basin Campground, even if we had to move to a new spot the next day due to our own spot being reserved for someone else. We moved about 5 spots down, so we just sort of paraded everything down the road. Taido didn’t even put the camper all the way down. Our neighbors said we looked like homesteaders walking behind the popped up camper with our kitchen supplies. I told them their description was not entirely inaccurate.
It was cold our first night, so cold that it even snowed a little. I couldn’t bear to come out of my sleeping bag and when I did have to undo my drawstring a little to poke my head out and cover Simon back up, I had hopes that maybe our next destination would be at a slightly lower elevation. It seems like our current itinerary, drawn up by the gearhead, goes from one mountain range to another. I might have known I would be freezing cold in a campground called Glacier Basin, but I haven’t seen a bug yet. I did say many grateful prayers for our camper. Even though I think I was shaking down to my bones, I was so glad I could go inside, turn on a light switch and sit down on a little couch to read the next chapter of our book to the kids. Had I been crawling into a tent, I think I might have started crying. The second night was a tad warmer, but in exchange for its being not as cold, we got rain. Thankfully it had stopped when we packed the camper down at 6:30 this morning. We tried to tuck the wet outside edges in a way that the inside will not be wet when we open it around 10pm tonight in the Tetons. We’ll see.
Most oft repeated phrase at this point is Taido saying, “We’re living the dream honey. Living the dream.” It is usually said in response to a look I am giving him about something that is obviously less than dreamlike, like being up with Si in the middle of the night or a request for an item however small, that will send me crawling through the van digging through fifteen different plastic tubs I am not sure how many more times he is going to say it without getting a black eye.
my car died from the long ride to colorado and is unhappily installed in the shop for who knows how long
my hands and feet are swollen and covered in hives (returning from altitude? allergies? arkansas blooms?)
and i cannot walk (yoga yesterday? long drive home? skiing hard in an out of shape, old body?)
obviously, this is not my thankful list. we are all exhausted. i am digging myself out from under the mounds and mounds of laundry, but when i look at these pictures, i remember how much fun we had, and it is all worth it! oh, the memories we will keep in our hearts from this week. and as for simon, he didn’t miss us at all. he had all kinds of fun with family back here in arkansas.
taido and i talked the night before we left crested butte about what a great week it had been and as we started to think through our plan for leaving, he said that it would be okay with him if we left later rather than earlier. that we could still have one more full day in colorado. well, since i was still trying to figure out how we could stay forever, i was definitely game for that plan. we decided that we would call early the next morning down to noah’s ark in buena vista and if they could take tai and the three big kids, we would have one more great adventure.
this was the first time that we have come to colorado when all three of our older kids were old enough to whitewater raft. ben barely made the cutoff at 6. mary polly was a little tentative when she saw the pictures at the outpost, but she went with it. and they all absolutely loved it. come on, how could you not?
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