White Noise

Labor Day! Andy's birthday usually falls during or around Labor Day Weekend, and we like to come up with something fun to celebrate this (in addition to the run-of-the-mill awesomeness that is a three-day weekend). Earlier this summer we realized that we had spent the previous FOUR Labor Days with our good friends Brian and Alexa, and since two's coincidence and three's a habit, we figured that four must be tradition and five must be a requirement! Or something like that. Last year if you remember, we went camping out near the Olympic Peninsula, about which you can refresh your memory here and here. Basically, it was really cold, we were not prepared for the weather because we didn't have many warm clothes, and no one got to go swimming except Minerva. I was determined that this year camping would be a sunny success, so I searched around for something EAST of I-5, away from cold rainy Forks vampire country. But why do I always leave the campground search for so late in the summer? I finally got lucky at a place called Lake Mayfield--exactly one tent campsite left in the whole place. The loneliness of it made me think that perhaps this was a patron who had had to cancel a previous reservation, and so I rejoiced at my computer and snapped up good 'ol Site 16 for the long weekend.
We have spent the summer visiting around and doing home improvement projects, as you loyal readers know, and when Labor Day suddenly loomed ahead Andy and I turned to the fairly accurate weather.com to see what was in store for our camping extravaganza. As Andy put it: 80-60-60. No, not the high temps...we wish. No, those were the percentage chances of PRECIPITATION for Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Hoo. Ray.
Okay, okay, nothing to panic about, right? So it would be cold, so what? And wet, yeah, lots of that. But we live up in Oregon, after all, so it's time we learned to suck it up, our dog included, and just let things get rained on...including ourselves. So this time we were determined that we would be SO prepared for everything--the cold, the wet, the unexpected showers, the lake that we couldn't swim in because it was so cold--that we would have a great time because nothing would take us by surprise. We would have so many blankets and jackets and dry clothes and things that we would be super-comfortable and completely at ease. Huh. Yeah, we should have known it wouldn't be that easy.
We left Hillsboro on the Friday afternoon and didn't hit a lick of traffic (should that have been the first preternatural sign that we should expect the unexpected?). Lake Mayfield is located almost exactly halfway between Portland and Seattle, so a totally ideal camping location for us and our Emerald-City-livin' friends since we would each drive less than two hours. Andy, Alton, Minerva and I settled once again into our faithful compact truck (Andy striking a yoga-esque pose in the backseat with the dog while I drove and Alton rode airbagless shotgun) and scooted on up the I-5 to our destination. The lake is just a little ways south of Chehalis, WA, which you have never heard of because it's freakin' small, and the fact that this unknown town is one of the nearest major landmarks to the lake should let you know that it's off that stretch of the highway where there seems to be nothing for miles and miles. (I was once driving home from Seattle by myself with Alton, and it was during this barren track that my five-month-old baby decided to wail the windows out of the car because he was sick of being in his car seat, overtired, and wanting to be held. I fruitlessly searched for a decent place to stop--a gas station that maybe wasn't named "Bud's," a shopping center, even a lone McDonald's?--and kept pulling off at random tiny freaky exits to console my crying infant, only to have him start up sobbing again once the car was in motion, all the while getting frightened at the growing darkness of the sky that indicated that it was getting close to nighttime and I was hours from home in Boontown, Population: Me. But that was last year.)
We exited the highway with about 15 more miles to go to the campsite and looked around for dinner. Why, oh why, did we wait so long for our food break? Not a Dairy Queen to be seen--the only two dinner options were those wood-wall-paneled, be-fake-flowered, sticky plastic table menu places called "Spiffy's" and "Jammer's Family Restaurant." I'm. Not. Kidding. We opted for "Spiffy's" since it was more on our way, and as I scanned the menu looking for your basic burger, I noticed a particularly ominous "raw food" warning accompanying that section of the menu that actually scared me into ordering my burger medium-well. Now, my parents enjoy a properly-cooked, but quite pink, steak, and have transferred their tastes to us kids for the most part, so that Andy likes to joke that he eats his red meat as shoe leather and I like it "still mooing." I'm not sure if the burger that Spiffy's served to me had ever made the acquaintance of a frygrill in its life (and yes, I say "life," because I think it was still alive). I can see where an inexperienced chef might occasionally undercook a thick, maybe 1/2 lb. burger, but this was a slim patty that would not have been out of place at any fast-food restaurant, and it was...well, let's just say there was oozing involved. Heh, maybe that's already more than you wanted to know. But recall any jokes you've ever heard about the meat just getting lightly passed over the cooking flame, and you've got my burger in mind. Yes, I know, I should have sent it back immediately, but I actually started eating the more "done" side, and it wasn't until I was halfway through that I realized just how juicy it was. But time was a-wastin', and Flo and her cohorts weren't exactly breaking any speed records, so I just wolfed down my fries and we beat feet out of there. Spiffy's will never know that heat = cooking unless perchance they read this blog, which I'm sure they will since it's awesome.
But back in the truck, we sped out to the campsite and began to unload, then left Andy behind to start setting up the tent while Alton and I went in search of--doh!--an ATM, to purchase firewood from the cash-only campground office. We got back with money and wood just in time for it to be too late for a fire because we were tired, it was starting to rain, and we needed to get the sleeping bags and Alton travel crib quarters up and running. So I'll tell you right now, the first night was bad, but the second night was not bad. I think the first night was bad because Alton was up far too late and feeling overtired, we didn't quite have his crib setup down perfect (we learned from our experience for the second night), and we didn't have a nightlight that could shine all night (might have been a bit afraid of the dark!). It probably helped that the second night he was very, very tired from walking miles all over the campground all day long.
One of the things that they tell new parents nowadays is that babies really like white noise. After having lived for nine (ten) months in a womb surrounded by the sounds of mother's pumping blood, beating heart, breathing, talking, digestion, etc., all being blasted at a decibel level on par with a vacuum cleaner, the baby finds it comforting to hear white noise while he sleeps instead of silence. We actually run a humidifier in his room at night to help with his dry, sensitive skin, but when we are traveling we rely on something else to provide white noise: an iPod. We have loaded our iPod with a white noise CD that has tracks on it like heartbeat sounds, a hairdryer, and (my favorite) rain on a roof. When Alton was very small I would put the CD in my car to relax him when he was at war with his car seat, and I'd be driving around a gorgeous, sunny Hillsboro with the sounds of a steady downpour filling my ears in the driver's seat. At other people's houses or hotels, we plug in the iPod, put "Rain on a Roof" on repeat, and position the little earphones of the iPod on a chair seat or table somewhere near Alton's crib. Voila! White noise on the go.
We didn't need to worry about white noise for this camping trip, though, because it poured rain all...night...long. We only ended up with a tiny bit of water in the tent (on Andy's side of the sleeping bags; thank goodness because Alton ended up snuggled on my side for at least half the night) that required a little shoring up of tarps and rearranging of tent for the next night. Alton seemed a bit weirded out by the rain, the dark, the bed situation, the weird temperature...it was cold, but at the same time so humid that you would sweat. Anything in the tent that was made of cotton just felt wet, all the time. Partway through the night Alton decided that he'd had enough of this nonsense and wanted to be snuggled very tightly in my arms. I was torn; half feeling that my arms would (and did) fall asleep because of the weird position I was in to cuddle him, but half enjoying the intense snugglage and reminiscing that the last time he wanted to be held so securely to sleep through the night was one night on an air mattress with me during Brian and Alexa's wedding weekend, a year ago. Our baby is getting so big! Although forget about pins 'n needles in the arms--we hadn't remembered to bring our PILLOWS. Now that will make you uncomfortable sleeping on the ground.

Saturday turned out quite fine, although in the morning it was still raining off and on. Not much fun to cook breakfast on a campstove in the rain, and less fun to try to eat it with baby on your lap in the "sunporch" of your tent. Brian and Alexa arrived at lunchtime after a pit stop to Kmart to buy new sleeping bags to replace the ones that they had forgotten (although they got our text requesting that they bring us extra pillows--awesome!), and they proceeded to have a blast walking Alton around...and around...and around. With the temperatures still low (although the rain had subsided), we couldn't go swimming, so we sat and talked, made dinner plans, took Alton to the playground at the day-use area, and went for long walks around the campgrounds. Alton at one point decided to painstakingly place small rocks along a fence slat, which Andy has pictured here:

We enjoyed a beautiful sunset, scrumptious hot dogs, and here is where our trip pretty much ends. Alton went to bed without much fuss, exhausted from his treks around the loops, and the adults were able to kick back under the clear sky at the campfire, roast a zillion s'mores, and just hang out (Minerva would like to firmly state here that she would have preferred to be in BED. Yeah, got it, 'Nerve.). We slept like logs, Alton didn't get up until 7:30, but it rained all night and all the next morning. A reluctant check of the hour-by-hour forecast showed that it was going to be uninterrupted rain all day, with a brief reprieve very late in the evening. Mmm, that's okay. We started packing up our stuff inside the tent and tore the structure itself down when the rain momentarily slackened. We got Alton his lunch, he conked out in the car and slept deeply all the way home, and we tossed our wet, muddy, dirty gear into the garage to go order pizza and take long, hot showers. Aaaaaah.

During our numerous walks, we tried to take note of a few really cool-looking site locations, so that next year we could book those for INDEPENDENCE DAY weekend.