Well, I had anticipated a quite weekend for reflection and conversation. I wasn't disappointed at all but it wasn't the quiet weekend I had hoped for – not till the kids went to bed anyway. Our campmates were entirely too gracious!!! I think that I was about as high strung as I could be. This was the first time that we had been camping in two (or maybe three) years, so we were quite out of practice, and to add seasoning we brought two children under the age of three. Wow!! Fun, but I am clearly not equipped to deal with children in a camping environment. Hehehehehehe. It was really fun! My hope was that Amy and I weren't too unhinged so as to scare off our friends on our first real outing together.
The conversation was great though. "D" (because I am not sure of the etiquette of using other people's names in a blog environment) and I stayed up well beyond the kids and the wives to try and solve all the mysteries of the universe. We talked about everything from interpreting the Bible to finance, to poverty. I confess I was having a hard time keeping up. I never did really recover from my work week.
Our days were spent on the beach or walking through the forests enjoying the 'vistas' and watching the kids being entertained hunting for mushrooms and building fairy houses. Even the fairies were well behaved and didn't wake us when they came at night to visit their shelters.
The weekend was a good warm up for our return to civilization. After being home only a couple of hours we discovered that we had somehow drained the well. I blame it on my overzealous watering of the very thirsty garden and the number of baths that were needed to find the children underneath all the dirt. I was very impressed to discover that my well is only 12 feet deep, and at that the high water mark was only 9 feet. I am impressed that we have made it as long as we have with the traffic that is constantly flowing through.
So it has been a major challenge . . . no showers, no flushing toilets, no running drinking water. Very inconvenient, but I wouldn't change it for the world. It has caused us to think a lot about the millions that live without access to good drinking water, or have to hike in order just to access it. Even James at dinner was saying that the whole situation made him think about how wasting food is bad. So I have been taking trips down to the river (which conveniently is only about an acre away – no big feat really) to fill up our "water urn" so that we can have a flushable toilet. We have been buying our drinking water – school starts in two days and I don't want to risk anyone getting sick from some silly parasite. In spite of that we have been rationing, measuring every ounce of water we use and how we use it and why. We have been sharing bathing water and recycling dish water to flush the toilets or water the plants. Part of me wants it to never end, because we have to think about it, we have to monitor our use and we are so much less wasteful. Sometime less is more.
Like my friends we went camping with shared through their lives and thinking, it is a very good thing to try and "need" less and use less, and rely on less and be content with less. Then we know what we need. (Sorry to paraphrase guys . . . it is just my observation!)
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