Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Favorite Vacation Moment

Dusk was falling as my sister Jenn and I traded our bare feet for dirty sneakers and zipped into our warmest sweatshirts for a short trek down to the river's edge. Initially the greatest thrill of our adventure was leaving our combined total of nine children in the hands of their daddies at the bedtime hour (and thus escaping that necessary but tiring task which often depleted our final vestiges of energy before "adult" time even began each night of vacation!)

With fishing pole in hand and having receiving final instructions from Montana Man (aka, brother-in-law Mark) himself, we approached with anticipation the area where the local caretaker of our rental cabin had earlier that week caught a salmon of immense proportions. Somewhat to our chagrin we noted that the point from which he fished could be reached only through a bit of hiking and ingenuity, but having complete confidence naiveté in our abilities in those areas we decided to give it a try.

It was the bamboo forest which first brought us up short. Or at least, made us think short - because with a good amount of giggling we realized that getting to the aforementioned point was going to involve crawling on our hands and knees, in the twilight, under leaning branches and over twisted tree trunks and ever so carefully around jutting and piercing, broken bamboo spears shooting out of the muddy ground.

What followed was a comedy of contortions, but finally we found ourselves at the magical spot and I graciously cheered my sister on in her attempts to cast for that perfect catch. It really was a beautiful location, and even the rain softly falling on the running river added to the peaceful serenity. Unfortunately that serenity didn't settle into Jenn's soul, as she admitted to being a bit nervous in the great outdoors. More than once a big rock slipped from underfoot and every time she jumped and I laughed and undoubtedly all the fish scattered! (Meanwhile we lamented aloud the lack of our other sister Terri, who has probably logged more fishing hours than both of us combined and might have enabled us to return in victory to our expectant hubbies!)

We stumbled home in the dark, muddied, wet and fish-less, but buoyed by the refreshing break to our usual routine. More adventures would follow, but this was one vacation moment I knew I would smile over for a long time. :)

1 comment:

panim said...

Okay, so I wasn't nervous of the outdoors - I was nervous about falling into the river with the giant sea creatures...