Memorable Memorial Day

Memorial Day weekend brought a day off from work for Christopher, the first camping trip of the season and a new addition to Christopher’s family.

But about the camping first. Camping reservations in California hot spots, or just about anywhere on a holiday weekend, can be hard to come by if you don’t plan months in advance. Plan months in advance we did not do. However, in an official national forest one can camp just about anywhere and for the actual campgrounds many don’t even take reservations. Now it just so happens that a friend of mine from college is working in the Mendocino National Forest so we decided to head to Mendocino for Memorial Day weekend. We never did get to see her because she was working the whole time in a different part of the park but it was a nice place to go to anyway.

Overall it was nicey. I’ll admit it wasn’t the best camping experience ever. It wasn’t an “enjoy nature” sort of crowd. In general, the forest was full of real rough red-neck sorts. I don’t mean the unsophisticated farmer types, more like an “escape from the laws and constraints of civilization” with a dash of menace kind of attitude. All around us people were blasting music from early morning until late at night and getting drunk. While driving around to explore the Pillsbury Lake Basin (where we were camping) we found a makeshift shooting range with many, many people shooting stuff in the hills. The dominant activity seemed to be driving loud, obnoxious vehicles around in the dirt and when we tried to find the one hiking trail we came upon a group of people camping illegally a quarter mile in (with many big, beaten down trucks) who told us the hiking trail didn’t exist. We felt somewhat uncomfortable and my foot was hurting anyway so we just abandoned the whole hiking idea. In general it seemed like the kind of crowd that would have Confederate Flags, gun racks and not a lot of teeth.

It wasn’t really all that bad. Many of the people were fine and friendly. It was also quite a pretty place – very inspiring for my morning yoga each day - and I got to spend the whole weekend with my hunny bun eating some gourmet camping food: enchiladas, tomato/red pepper soup, “Asian Crunch” salad, egg salad, granola with yogurt and fresh fruit, cheese & apple quesadillas and more. We also slept an obscene amount at night, napped for hours in the afternoon, played a lot of stick with the sweet puppy dog Samson and had some good story time. I read out loud from The Jungle Book and Chris read out loud from a hilarious novel, Good Omens.


Honestly though, what makes the weekend truly memorable was Monday night. We got back to Chris’ house around 7:00, had just unloaded the car and were getting ready to bathe and eat when his parents’ called to say his sister-in-law Nikki had just gone into labor. Nikki was due many days earlier but the word was that there was still nothing happening and didn’t look like it would soon. However, labor she was in. We cleaned up as quickly as we could, ate something or other and got back in the car to drive another hour and a half to the hospital in Chico. I guess things went quickly in the beginning with whatever happens in labor but when they got to the pushing part around 10pm progress stopped. Nikki pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed and finally around 1am they decided to do a C-section. So then we waited for the doctor to get there, for the C-section to happen, for baby and mamma to spend the obligatory time in the recovery room and finally, at nearly 3 in the morning, got to meet the new addition – Maxon (see photo of Maxon with dad Buzz to the left.) Maxon was 9 pounds, 12 ounces and no wonder the behemoth wasn’t gonna make it out the birth canal. We finally made it back home around 4:45am and there was definitely the beginning of sunrise happening as we stumbled out of the car, but I’d say it was worth it – especially as I didn’t have to work the next morning. I’d not ever met someone who was less than an hour old before.

Memorial Day weekend was definitely memorable. I don’t get to pick the camping destinations for a while though.