Amidst all the packing and selling and Freecycling and house-searching / mover estimating / priority setting / general relocation hoo-ha, last week we went camping. And it was great.

At this time seven days ago I was stretching my arms and sipping coffee around a campfire at the O’Bannon Woods State Park, near Corydon, Indiana, way down there at the very bottom center of the state. We set up four tents on our two sites: One big one for Penny, Veda and me, another just like it for Grandma Lawson, a slightly smaller version for little-bro Mason and a fairly itty-bitty orange model for the largest member of our camping party. (Tom always has the coolest, sleekest, lightest-weight outdoor gear.)

Also included in our campsite facilities, (lest you think we were totally roughing it), were  a couple of picnic tables, a pre-rigged clothesline between a couple of trees, several square feet of semi-level ground and (ahem) an electrical outlet. Call us wusses if you like, but it’s darn nice to let your kid sleep accompanied by the whirring of a fan, and just as nice to wake up to freshly brewed coffee. Oh, and there was a bathroom about 50 yards away, with showers and everything.

But still. It’s a pretty immersive experience, pretending you don’t have a house for three days, and we enjoyed it a lot. Wednesday was basically spent getting there and setting up, with a friendly stop at Mom’s house for lunch and to drop off some long-term storage items in her capacious attic. On the way I managed to snap yet another picture of my favorite building in the world. This time Vince and I even left a note inside the big barn door, offering compliments and a request for more information if possible.

Seems like we arrived at O’Bannon a little before dinner time, I’d say, and it really didn’t take too long to get everything set up. Veda had a good time playing in the tents too — almost managed to collapse Grandma’s with some over-enthusiastic cavorting. Tom and Mason went to go check out where we could launch our boats the next morning.

I was amazed that Veda managed to fall asleep in the tent. At lights-out for her, there were still a few hours of campfire talking time left for us, and we were all sitting just about a dozen feet from her little bed. Plus it’s strange surroundings and all, and kind of hot besides. That big fan we grabbed from Mom’s came in really handy. V slept right on through everything, even when Penny and I had to open and close the flap several times as we got ready for bed ourselves. Didn’t wake up until almost seven the next day. Nice!

And that was the best day ever, because that’s when we go to go canoeing. Much like with the tents, we had four boats out there this time: A smallish one (Mason’s, for a change), two bigger ones for Tom and Grandma, and one even bigger one for me, Penny and Veda. We launched up in the northern section of the park, and followed the gorgeous Blue River almost six miles to the old iron bridge where you can haul the boats out. On the way we saw towering trees, hills taller and steeper than anything you’ll find in our usual part of the state, picturesque river bends, fluttering tadpoles and those little turtles who always like to sun themselves on the bank. Giant birds flew overhead, the shade kept us cool and comfy, and there weren’t even too many bugs to deal with. Mid-way through, we stopped and swam in the current for a while. Oh, and we saw this: Ever heard of a Hellbender before? We hadn’t either, but a group of wildlife ecologists from Purdue University was down there working on a conservation project to tag and protect this near-threatened species of giant salamander. For 65 million  years, these ugly mugs have been hanging out under rocks in swift-moving bodies of water, snacking on fish and crayfish and trying not to get eaten by turtles or snakes. “Anthropogenic” causes like damming of rivers, pollution and blocking of dispersal and migration routes have been wiping them out in increasing numbers. The Purdue guys were nice enough to show us the one they’d captured that morning, and Veda didn’t even seem too freaked out about it.

Swimming in the river current was probably the little one’s favorite part of the outing. She got braver and braver about immersing in the cool, rushing water, but I must admit that my parental bravery (and arm strength) was rapidly running out after about half an hour of gripping her little hands tightly, crossing from one side to the other and trying not to envision her swept out of my grasp, bobbing down toward the Ohio in her little pink lifejacket. She cried when we put her back in the boat to finish our journey.

That crying probably had more to do with her just needing a nap, though. Because after just a few more minutes of paddling, I noticed that the girls up front were awfully quiet… which wasn’t that unusual at first because the river’s so beautiful and everyone so unanimously agrees on that fact that after a while it’s no longer necessary to even comment on it. You just float and look around and wonder at it all. But Veda was a little too tired to wonder.

She woke up just as we were docking at the take-out point, which worked out pretty well. A really friendly gentleman was pulling out his little fishing boat, and apologized in a southern drawl that he couldn’t get the trailer in place any faster. The ride back to the campsite was short, and followed by a delicious lunch (though almost anything would have tasted fantastic at that point), which was followed by the other best part of the trip in my opinion, which was the O’Bannon Woods State Park pool.

There are two big pools, actually — one for big people and one for little ones — along with those fun squirty splash tubes that kids love to run through and hug. There was a little frog-mouth slide (Veda loved to climb up his back and come flying down his tongue, splashing into the warm water in a big giggling ruckus) and two big water-park slides, including a twisty blue one and a straight-down green one. So much fun. And I didn’t even get sunburnt. Much. The reason it was so enjoyable, though, was mainly that Niki and Zoë came to play with us for the afternoon (That’s P and N atop the straight-chute slide tower in the picture), and Zoë Kline is so cute it’s just not even within reason.

See what I mean? That night we sat around the campfire and told jokes and stories again, and Mason reclined on the hood of his truck for a little quality time with the Dakota Sport. Teenagers are funny.

Oh, and that might have been the evening we had vegetable shish kabobs on the fire, and, yeah — they were as good as they looked. Another good night’s sleep for Veda and another few rounds of uneventful flap-zipping, and we were ready the next morning for our next adventure: Squire Boone Caverns. A pretty spectacular cave, I must say, especially for not being all that big. We saw underground waterfalls, some “elephant ear” sheets of rock that were translucently thin, and even a 44-ft stream of water coming off a huge stalactite way up in the ceiling of the biggest room. (Niki’s quote: “Uh oh, we got a leak.”) Toward the end the cave guide turned off all the lights for several seconds, and neither Veda nor Zoë shrieked at all.

And outside they’ve got two goats to pet, along with a plain old cat who was nonetheless very friendly and barely tried to swat Veda for interrupting its nap. After the tour we walked over to the bakery for some snacks, and Tom and Sharon and I got to see the workings of a real grist mill on our way out. I think I managed to irritate the tour guide by asking how the two 2,000-lb stone wheels were made and put in place at the mill, since those seemed to be at the core of the operation. He gently informed me that Squire Boone’s time wasn’t *that* long ago, and metal tools to chip and shape stone were readily available. Also, we were standing in an area with some of the most readily accessible limestone and other quarry-able rock in the world. Still, I thought it was impressive. And now I know where cornmeal comes (came) from.

That afternoon was fun too; we went back to the campsite for a nap and another trip to the pool, but Friday just couldn’t match up to that awesome Thursday. Not because an above-ground river beats a subterranean one, or because I failed to cross my legs for my last trip down the giant slide and nearly ruled out any chance for Veda to have any little brothers or sisters, or even because I got some sudden stomach upset as we were leaving the cave and didn’t want to eat any lunch or really even move for a couple hours.

The big problem was that poor Veda fell down and smashed up her little face that morning, before the cave outing, and you can probably even see her little scratches and the bump on her forehead in the picture. We all felt just terrible for her. Lots of screaming when it happened, though she was pretty much okay for the rest of the day. (Managed to fall down and smack the *exact same spots* later in the afternoon, though — poor kid had a rough day!)

So on Saturday, with scabby knees, bug spray in our skin and our tents impressively packed back up in the bags they came in, we rolled back north toward Indianapolis. There were birthday festivities for me and Katie, including an outing to her favorite local Mexican place where I confirmed that it is indeed an Out Of Control great mushroom quesadilla. Before that Veda and I waded in the creek behind mom’s house, and I marveled at how the little rocks at the streambed didn’t seem to hurt her little padded feet at all, while I was ooching and ahching at several points. And on Sunday I installed the patio speakers I’d promised Katie for her birthday *last* year, then got to blow out candles as a birthday boy for the 34th time. And play in the creek with my twin nieces Emily and Elizabeth. And catch up with Aunt Lynnda, who we don’t get to see very often but who always has great stories. All my cousins on my mom’s side came in, and even Aunt Kathy came down with her son Marco, which was super cool. I just finished the last of Aunt Kathy’s birthday brownies yesterday. Still awesome.

A fun summer adventure. 500-some miles, a handful of uneventful challenges tying boats to cars, some bug bites, a leech encounter, one gorgeous full moon and lots of family togetherness. Oh, and I forgot to mention our other camp mates at O’Bannon… they visited every night and actually kind of freaked me and Sharon out on Friday, when five or six showed up all at once. That’s a lot of pairs of little glowing eyes out in the woods. Fortunately we were able to persuade them to move along.

And Veda’s boo-boos are almost totally healed by now.

Such is the restorative power of a little break from the usual.