Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Did You Dye Your Hair?

Sincere apologies to my three loyal readers for my absence, and a huge THANK YOU to my one super fan for Facebooking me that you missed me…you’re the best, T!

As you can imagine, the last few weeks of a school year are intense.  Closing out the current school year, while simultaneously planning and prepping for the next school year, is all kinds of crazy!

And if that weren’t enough to nearly do me in, the husband likes to take our summer vacation right away.  In fact, if he had his way, we’d leave the day school gets out.  No possible way I can make that happen without completely losing my mind (and he knows how close I come to that come June each year), so he gladly compromises with the day after school gets out.  Still stressful, but doable nonetheless.

So that’s where I’ve been:  almost losing my mind finishing up the school year, and then finding it again on a long road trip with the family.  Now I realize that some people might say, “Road trip?!  Talk about losing your mind…I’d totally lose mine if I had to spend every single waking moment with my family on a road trip.”  Well, I feel the opposite.   

The family road trip is my favorite vacation, hands down (especially as our kids get older).  I love that, while driving, my husband is to my left and my kids are behind me and I can literally reach out and touch any one of them anytime I want!  I love that my daughter and I slept side-by-side for 15 nights…in a row!  And I love that my family and I ate EVERY single meal together for 16 straight days.  No other vacation allows for that kind of 24/7 family time…and I love every single minute of it.

Being together for such long stretches of time will obviously yield some pretty funny stories.  Take, for example, this one…

The main itinerary of our road trip was Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Gates of Lodore (a river rafting trip on the Green River), and Vegas, and this story involves our time in the Grand Teton area.

One of my “Running Bucket List” items was to run with the Grand Tetons as the backdrop.  If you’ve never been to this area before, I have to tell you that it is beautiful beyond words.  You owe it to yourself to go!

When we first arrived we began scouting places that might be good to run.  As luck would have it, there’s a great bike path that runs from South Jenny Lake to Moose Junction…it’s a total of 7.3 miles, which was perfect since I was looking to run about 5 miles…I ended up running 5.5!  Well, I say running, but really I was jogging.  But still, 5.5 miles at that elevation (and against the wind…carrying my siblings on my shoulders…in the snow…hee, hee, hee) was no easy feat, I assure you. 

So I walked a mile warm up, ran the 5.5, and then walked a cool down for the remaining distance of the path.  It was truly spectacular!

My family was very sweet and stopped at various spots along the way to cheer me on and take pictures.  When I was finished, they picked me up and we headed to nearby Leigh Lake for a hike…well, they were going to hike anyway…I was done!  I figured I had had enough exercise for the day so I gladly stayed behind in the camper while they enjoyed a little exercise of their own…more than a little, really, since it was a seven-mile hike!  No way was I going on it!

Instead, I hung back and participated in my favorite camping activities:  reading, crossword puzzles, and snacking.  About three hours later they return all excited…I’ll tell you why next time…but for now, they come back and they are all very happy.  I, too, am happy, because, well, I’ve pretty much been sitting on my bum the entire time! 

My son steps in the camper, takes one look at me, and says, “Did you dye your hair?”

Now, at first glance, this seems like a simple enough question.  But remember, we’re in the middle of a road trip…where/how on Earth would I dye my hair?  First off, I don’t even dye my own hair (and he knows that), which means he thinks I went somewhere and had my hair dyed!  Again, how on Earth would I do this?  We are in the Grand Tetons!  The closet place I can think of where any type of grooming might even be remotely possible would be Jackson, which I know is about 30 minutes to an hour away, but in which direction I have no clue!

After I gave him my best perplexed look, and laughed at him a bit for good measure, I said, “Um, no son, I did not dye my hair…what you see is called grease!”

Eww…my hair was so dirty that my son thought I dyed it!  Talk about gross…and talk about needing a shower…STAT! 

2 comments:

  1. I was jealous for a sec...thought you were cheating on me!!!! lol

    ReplyDelete