Highlights Week 35

We went to the Stirling Brown's for dinner on Sunday, then had another pretty typical week. My big job for this week was the sewing room, and getting it picked up and organized means I've finally addressed every room in the house! I also spent several hours doing yard work (mostly pulling weeds and clearing out a couple dead bushes). Maybe someday we'll have a lovely backyard, but there are so many more fun things to spend time and money on, so for now it continues to be a haven for digging, building, and burning.

The big excitement this week was the purchase off Craigslist of a kayak! Matthew spent many, many hours rigging up the battery for a motor, and customizing the truck extender, and adding rod holders, and sorting out fishing gear and life jackets, and generally getting us all ready to be a boating family.

Every May and September I feel the pull to utilize the rare Monday holidays that Matthew actually gets off work and head into the mountains. Even though Matthew abhors competing with the masses for campsites and fishing spots, it always feels like such a waste to me to stay home over the long weekend, and since we hadn't been camping as a family even once over the summer, I was especially keen to get out of town. With help from the itch to try out our new toy, I convinced him to attempt Eagle Nest over the holiday weekend. We worked all day on Friday to be ready, but still ended up leaving an hour later than we had hoped after the kids got home from school. It's a 3 hour drive, and we didn't arrive at our intended camp area until after dark. We planned on camping at a spot of public land about 20 minutes outside of Angel Fire. It's not a proper campground, and not even marked on maps as BLM land, so I'm not sure how we could have checked before hand, but when we arrived there was a gate blocking off the road with a notice that the area was closed indefinitely due to the fires that had burned through over the summer. Talk about a massive disappointment! We had no cell service in the canyon, so we drove into Angel Fire to see if we could find any other options for the night. There were only a handful of airbnb's available, and the cheapest one was $400. The couple of RV parks in the area were already closed for the night, and the solitary motel over in Eagle Nest was full. There's no other public land in the area, so our only viable option was to pick out some treats from the little grocery store, then turn around and drive home. It was an extremely disappointing attempt at an adventure, topped off with a traffic jam on the freeway at 11:30 pm. Matthew is fully vindicated and I will not suggest camping over Labor day weekend without proper reservations ever again!

While the kids were real troopers and never complained, they were definitely annoyed at having to spend 6 hours in the car with no awesome adventure to show for it, so we decided to try again today. After ample time to sleep in and recover from our late night, we packed up and headed to Cochiti, which is only an hour away. We surprised the kids with the addition of an inflatable kayak, and all 5 of us were able to spend the afternoon on the water.

We also bought a new tent! The bell tent, while amazing in some ways, is far too cumbersome for single night adventures, and it's been annoying to have to set up multiple small tents to fit us all, so we found a reasonable holiday deal on the Big Agnes tent we've been eyeballing for a while. It's perhaps still a bit overkill size wise, but not nearly as heavy and a much more convenient shape and design. Plus, the fly doubles as a sweet sun shade. While we didn't get to sleep in it, I'm already quite happy with it's prospects! 

We spent about 6 hours on the lake, fishing and swimming and mucking around. We didn't catch anything, but we got our kayaking feet wet (so to speak) and learned a lot about how to make our next adventure even better.

We stopped by Walmart on the way home, where everyone picked something out to contribute to dinner, then went home and watched some She Hulk and Rings of Power. It turned out to be one of the funnest days in Kress family history.