1. It's the middle of November. You are just coming down with the same cold that your nearly three-year-old has been festering in for the last week (specific symptoms: scratchy throat, prickly skin, and what feels like a tiny PG&E employee with a jackhammer in your left sinus). The sum total of your wilderness experience to date has been exclusively during the summer months, and all camping trips have involved the presence of a more experienced adult. For any female readers between the ages of 12 and 50, your period is also imminent. You decide to:
A. Invest in several boxes of lotion-softened extra-fancy Kleenex, turn up the heat to irresponsibly luxurious, planet-threatening levels and reread Speak, Memory for the second time (you) and Frog & Toad for the 204,583rd time (toddler).
B. Go to bed for the weekend with your Ipod & let the toddler fend for herself. She knows how to make cereal, use the toilet, and more or less brush her teeth. She'll be fine.
C. Split your weekend between drinking tea & doing papier-mache projects with all the free "East Bay Chronicle" newspapers that someone somewhere seems to think you want/need/would ever read. Definitely do not leave the house.
D. Cobble together a load of camping equipment from various garage shelves & kind friends, pick toddler up early from school, and drive four hours to Yosemite, where you have no reservations at the one walk-in campground that is still open in the wintertime, and where the weather is forecast to be just about exactly freezing at night, and where the little "partly sunny" icon on www.wunderground.com depicts, somewhat pessimistically, a large cloud nearly obscuring a tiny sun, rather than the other way around.
CORRECT ANSWER: D. Hooray! Off we go!
2. Once you arrive at Yosemite, you check into the Lodge at Yosemite Falls (which sounds grand, but is actually an overpriced motel, but it is worth it, because even you are not stupid enough to try and arrive and do the camp setup thing in the dark, in November, with toddler, etc.) You eat the dinner you have brought with you, allow toddler to jump on the bed in demented excitement at being IN A HOTEL, MUMMY!!!, and then decide to venture out to blow the coupons you were given upon registration for 1 (One) Free Cup of Hot Tea or Coffee at the Food Court. You and toddler bundle up and head out. Once at the Food Court, you:
A. Take one look at the sticky tables, giant TV screens, and abdominal girth of average patron, and think, meh, I'll give it a miss.
B. Insist on small healthy snack, and then home early to bed, as there is a lot to do tomorrow
C. Split a piece of pecan pie of Half Dome-dimensions and allow toddler to drink the gallon-size glass of milk that the waiter brought, thus guaranteeing that she will spend the next two hours bouncing off walls pretending to be a bear before she collapses into a hyperglycemic coma (followed by midnight and 3 a.m. high-volume urgent distress yipping, because her bladder needs emptying and she can't get up to use the toilet without you there to hold her hand.)
CORRECT ANSWER: C. How is your sore throat feeling, by the way?
3. The following morning, you scrape the frost off the car (sleeping outside tonight...mmmm.....) you make your way to the campground with the help of a cheerful park-ranger-type dude who is doing some park-maintenance-type activities on the side of the road. The most logical response to the query, "Excuse me, is this the correct way to Camp 4?" is:
A. "Yes, that's right, it's just a little further down on the right."
B. "No, that way will get you back to the Lodge."
C. "Go another three miles, take a left, and you'll see the parking lot right there."
D. "Um, well, where's your husband?"
CORRECT ANSWER: D. Really??! Yes, really. That's what he said.
4. Having apparently remembered to bring all camping essentials _other_ than a husband, you successfully set up camp at Camp 4: a large and only a little bit smelly tent (readers unfamiliar with the Great Tent Swap Mystery of 2007, in which my two-person yellow Walrus tent disappeared from my garage & was replaced by a battered but perfectly serviceable three-person blue Eureka tent of completely unknown provenance, will have to wait for another blogpost for details), a camping hammock, a motley collection of sleeping pads & bags, enough layers of fleece to satisfy even toddler's Taiwanese grandparents (lovely people capable of worrying about hypothermia in Orange County in August), an ice-chest full of fig bars, chocolate, and freeze-dried food, and (last-minute impulse buy from REI):
A. a natty little camping stove which comes in a bag measuring approximately 3" by 3" square, weighs a jillionth of an ounce, lights without a fuss every time, and can boil porridge for two people faster than my kitchen stove at home, a revelation for anyone imprinted on gigantic clunky Coleman stoves circa 1963 that are about as straightforward to use as an aircraft carrier.
B. A combination Japanese steel folding knife, LED light, and (very loud - toddler tested it) bear-scaring emergency whistle
C. A microfiber sleeping bag liner, which promises to raise the temperature of your 'sleep experience' by five degrees centigrade, which when you are contemplating the large-cloud-in-front-of-tiny-sun icon before your trip is nothing to sneeze at, no no no.
D. A headlamp/torch set up that you could reasonably do helicopter searches with, along with a little mini blinking emergency light that can be attached to toddler.
E. All of the above!
CORRECT ANSWER: E. REI dividend check may actually be worth something this year...
5. Having set up camp & fed toddler breakfast, you decide to go for a short hike. You pack a lunch & head out of the campground along the trail to upper Yosemite Falls (an unrealistic seven miles, but what the hell, you'll go as far as you can, and then turn back). Toddler stops frequently to exclaim, "Wow, Mummy, LOOK!!!!" She is admiring:
A. The crystal clear view of Half Dome in the distance, framed by a perfectly blue sky
B. The amazing oranges and reds of the autumn foliage in Cook's Meadow below us
C. The sun sparkling off the Merced River winding away at the base of the steep white granite cliffs
D. The puke and maroon stripes on her legwarmers and pink dinosaurs on her snow boots.
CORRECT ANSWER: D. We are slaves to fashion, even when in survivalist mode.
6. You get back to camp that night, and notice that yours is the only campsite with a hammock (where you have been intending to sleep, since wunderground.com did at least say "0% chance precipitation"). You have read that some parks ban hammocks on the grounds that the straps could theoretically hurt the trees, but have seen no such prohibition anywhere on the website or ranger stations at Yosemite. You ask the guy at the campsite next to you if he knows why no one else is using a hammock. He says, oh, I think people are sticking to tents just because it's been so incredibly cold at night. You think:
A. Oh fuckit, let's pack up and go home now, before it gets too late.
B. We could always just go back to the lodge - I'm sure they have rooms free, and it wasn't THAT expensive
C. Well, I suppose we can do one night in the tent and see how it goes; we've got plenty of fleece, so I -think- we'll be OK.
D. WAAAAAHHH!!!! BUT I WANT TO SLEEP IN THE HAMMOCK!!!!
CORRECT ANSWER: D. (I watched a youtube video before we left - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnoo4BPe2eo by this guy who is proponent of winter hammock camping. He lives in Minnesota, so I figured he knew what he was talking about.)
7. After setting up your hammock with two long sleeping pads lengthwise, a kids' short therma-rest across the middle to prevent Cold Bum Syndrome (a phenomenon common to hammock-campers that the internets, god bless 'em, raised your consciousness about), sleeping bags plus liners, an extra quilt you happened to have in the car, and a just-in-case-wunderground-was-wrong rain fly on a guyrope over the top of the whole thing, and a well-fed toddler rocking thermal underwear and fleece pyjamas, the approximate temperature inside your hammock (and corresponding number of hours of quality sleep you are able to get) is:
A. 40 degrees Kelvin; it wasn't so much sleep as hypothermic metabolic shutdown
B. 33 degrees Fahrenheit: not quite freezing, but we barely slept - should have gone back to the lodge
C. 55 degrees: cold, slept maybe a couple of hours
D. 85 degrees: would have slept eight hours straight except for had to get up at 2 am to peel a layer off each of us because it was -too- warm. (Also, I was still sick, and I wanted a throat drop. But it was really comfy).
CORRECT ANSWER. D. Boo-yah, suckahz, never sleeping in a tent again. Hammocks & microfiber sleeping bag liners rule.
8. The next morning, it is beautiful and clear again, not a cloud in the sky (did we mention it was also full moon, amazing stars, etc.?) but you have to admit, bloody cold. Important parenting lessons you learn this morning include:
A. If you let toddler cavort around the campsite in just her pyjamas and do not absolutely insist on her putting on a coat right now, no matter what, even though she says is not cold and she doesn't want a coat, very soon she will be really cold.
B. When toddlers become cold, they become really bad-tempered.
C. When they are really bad-tempered, they will refuse to do anything at all you suggest, such as (duh) putting on a coat, hat, gloves, etc. to get warm.
D. If they continue to furiously resist coats, thereby getting even colder, they will push forward the frontiers of bad-temperedness into previously uncharted territories of total foulness.
E. Despite all your prior good intentions to raise a good Junior Ranger and teach your child not to drop food at the campsite so as not to attract bears, there will come a time when you will see her dropping bits of her breakfast all over herself and think quietly homicidal thoughts about not cleaning her up afterwards, so as to make her as appetizing as possible for any passing bears.
CORRECT ANSWER: All of the above.
9. One Pyrrhic victory in the coat/breakfast battle later, you decide to scale down your ambitions and walk up the Mist Trail to Vernal Falls (mostly paved, three-ish miles round trip), having stopped in at the Yosemite Valley Visitor Center to talk to a different very friendly (non-sexist, sequitur-capable) park ranger (you) and obsessively stroke the model of a volcano's interior, complete with glowing plastic orange magma (toddler). You take the free shuttle from the Visitor Center (see, now, THIS is a REALLY GOOD USE of tax dollars, any government agents who happen to be reading this, please take note) to the trailhead, and set off. Examples of toddler's abject failure to adhere to basic scientific principles include:
A. Energy: she whined & complained & required bribing & moved approximately three feet an hour for the entire first mile of the hike, and then _ran_ the subsequent two miles at top speed ("Mummy, I zoom like a cheetah!").
B. Thermodynamics: she insisted on stripping off and wading into water that had actual ice-crystals on the actual surface, without becoming either cold or bad-tempered
C. Gravity: she is a surprisingly adept rock climber, and more than once I turned around to discover her four feet up a vertical rock face, saying gleefully, "Mummy, look at me! I'm a bit of an expert!"
D. Conservation of mass: Her stomach can hold consistently 2 oz of nutritious lovingly-prepared picnic lunch, but is a superdense black hole for near infinite weights of fig bars and raisins.
CORRECT ANSWER: All of the above.
10. You attempt to go to "Story Time" at the Ahwahneechee Hotel; this is advertised as being appropriate for 3-6 year olds in the little free Yosemite newspaper thingy, but it turns out it's really for grownups: it's a ranger-type person waffling about the life of Galen Clark & John Muir and a couple of other people, which would be interesting had it not been about one nugget of actual information per twenty minutes with a lot of rhetorical huffpuff in between. Toddler made sure that we could not even enjoy the experience of comfy leather chairs next to a roaring fire in a very posh hotel by:
A. Wriggling continuously as if infested by fire ants
B. Trying to make paper airplanes out of the tear-out cards from a nearby Oprah Magazine
C. Announcing loudly to the room that she needed to peepee, and then contradicting herself as soon as I stood up to take to her to the loo.
CORRECT ANSWER: sorry, this is getting monotonous. all of the above.
EXTRA CREDIT QUESTION:
By now having hammock-sleeping down to an art (eight consecutive hours of warm comfy sleep!) you remember to make the wearing of a coat & hat a compulsory condition of toddler's being allowed to get out of bed. The adjacent campground is now occupied by a woefully underprepared Mexican pair and their equally unprepared Argentinean friend, who are camping for the first time ever (their cold weather outfits consist of sweat pants and hoodies, and they have three thin cotton quilts between them; they did however bring a large teddy bear) and who compensate by making the largest bonfire possible in the firepit and eating marshmallows for breakfast (in Mexican Spanish, they're apparently just the generic "bonbon," whereas the Argentinean called them "malvaviscos;" interestingly spanishdict.com gives several Spanish terms for the English marshmallow, and says that "malvavisco" is the botanical term, i.e. marshmallow root, which is not used at all as an ingredient in the manufacture of present-day marshmallows (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshmallow)). But I digress. Planned activities for the day are: mile or so wander around Lower Yosemite Falls, picnic lunch at the falls, collect some leaves for school project, back to the car, drive home in time for dinner, much-needed bath, and bed. You
A. Follow your itinerary to the letter
B. End up wandering around Cook's Meadow feeling generally gobsmacked by how gorgeous it all is, sticking toes in Merced River, spend an hour riding a 'rhinoceros' (a large fallen tree), remember to collect a few leaves for the school project but not nearly as many as the teacher actually requested, eat lunch, do some more wandering around in the meadow (which, mindblowingly, was the bottom of a lake as recently as 1997), and then frogmarch toddler around Lower Yosemite Falls trail, just so you can say you did it, slaloming around clumps of Japanese senior citizens the whole way, then into the car and drive home.
So all in all, despite the fact that we were both sick, an absolutely terrific trip, and it made me want to go again (a) for way longer and (b) for proper wilderness backpacking, not just staying in a campground.
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