Not Our Traditional Vacation

Like so many others, our vacation plans were demolished by COVID before we even finalized them. We had planned to rent out our house during EAA (cancelled) this year for the first time and head to the Black Hills area for the week to introduce the boys to Mount Rushmore, Custer State Park, a few caves and revisit some past stops like Badlands and Chubby Chipmunk truffles. We hadn't made any reservations by the time the pandemic struck, which is good, since we would have had to cancel them all.

Our sitter is on vacation this week, renting a lake house with her family as safely as possible during the pandemic, so we headed down to our land for the week. We came down Saturday afternoon and are planning to head back late Saturday or Sunday morning. The good news is that Teddy actually falls asleep here with minimal fuss, likely because he's so exhausted from all the fresh air, playing in the river, oh, and getting up at 5 a.m. or earlier every day. Still, it's wonderful not to have to fight the battle to sleep that occurs on vacations in hotel rooms or even our tent. And Dave is a saint for taking Teddy for early morning drives to allow the rest of us some more sleep.

It doesn't feel like vacation, more like a long weekend, especially since except for a few days I'm still fielding calls for work. That violates my standards for vacation, but extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. But we're spending a lot of time outdoors, a lot of time together and still making memories.

This kid can convince most people to do just about anything.

We've covered a few projects, like hanging a second swing, moving rocks away from our garage, fixing the tractor and organizing the garage. We've also broken a few things, like the Ranger's radiator fan and the tractor's hydraulics that we just fixed. We've had visitors like my aunt one day and uncle another day. We've taken Ranger and tractor rides and Tahoe rides when both those were broken, but we've also done far more walks. We've made foraged mojitos and grilled some delicious breakfasts. We've played in the river every day except one, when it was cooler and rainy. We've had a fire and watched fireflies. We've seen misty mornings.

So much style. So much class.

Heck, today we even ventured to Effigy Mounds National Monument, which made it feel darn close to a real vacation for us. We all had masks, although Teddy pretty much just chewed on the string on his. We rarely had to use them because there were relatively few people and several opportunities to give each other enough space. I was pleasantly surprised that more than half of those we encountered had masks, and it was a really enjoyable 2-mile hike to look at some of the burial mounds. I was impressed with how much hiking Teddy did, especially of the 350-foot incline that started the hike. He managed about a third to half of that, along with two other sections of hiking. Granted, one section of hiking was inspired by the maintenance lawnmower he heard and the other was motivated by pushing me down the steep incline, which was great fun for him.

It's so neat to watch him take off down a hiking path, especially since I know our days of carrying him are limited. Each summer I say, just one more year, and then each year I still carry him. When we were hiking with my mom, she said that I can't carry him because I'll hurt myself. My answer was that without carrying him we wouldn't be able to enjoy the beautiful hike we were on. She understands why we carry him, and I understand her concern. But I'll carry him as long as I can because it's the only way for us to enjoy the places we want to explore. We don't live in an accessible world, so Teddy depends on us to make the world accessible for him as much as we can.

We even stopped for ice cream on the way back to the land, ordering with masks and eating in the vehicle, but it felt truly like vacation with a national park site, ice cream and a bit of windshield time. We are looking forward to revisiting Effigy Mounds in the future when we can go inside the visitor center and explore a bit more under normal circumstances.