Camping

Hey everyone!
As you all know, and have seen, by now, we had a great time camping this past weekend. It was definitely the right thing to do, rather than go to another hydroplane race. We had a lot of fun playing Uno on Saturday night...spending Saturday afternoon at the Recycled Art Festival in downtown Vancouver (how cool is it that you can go camping so close to home that you can still do stuff you would've done if you'd stayed home for the weekend?)...and just hanging out together.

As Dawn said, I love to do all the planning, putting together a menu and receipes, and cooking for our camping trips. That's half the fun for me. The time together is the rest of the fun. I spent probably three nights last week getting us ready, and doing the grocery shopping for the trip. As always, though, the best laid plans don't always work out perfectly. I forgot to pack silverware, which made eating stew an interesting challenge on Friday night.

But the stew was really good! We had the leftovers last night for dinner.

Yesterday afternoon, when we got home, there was a lot of work to do around here. We're selling the little Saturn we towed behind our motorhome, so I needed to wash that and get it all cleaned up, including getting all of our stuff out of it. We put the ad on Craigslist today.

A few of my buddies have let me know (including Ron) how good the championship heat was at the Seafair race this weekend -- the race we chose not to go to. But other buddies of mine (like Troy and the Lepinskis) have told me how much things have changed at Seafair, and how disappointed they all were. That's part of the reason I chose not to go. I can't stand the changes they've made at Seafair. It's all about the mighty buck...and the airshow.

Really sad, actually, because hydroplanes were the first pro sport in Seattle, 56 years ago. What's funny is the people who run Seafair, for the most part, aren't even from Seattle -- or the Northwest -- originally, so they have no feeling for the history and legacy of the hydroplanes in Seattle. Us fans don't like the fact that the organizers think that rock concerts, air shows and party barges that pay big bucks (and block the view of the race course for about 1/3 of the fans on shore). There was more time on the event schedule dedicated to the airshow than there was boat racing...but it was boat racing that put Seattle on the sports map back in 1950. People, my dad and I included, have been going to the hydroplane races at Seafair for most of our lives.

I'm feeling like the first weekend in August is better spent camping.