Friday Morning Report from Wakonda

Friday morning came really really early. Maeve had me up three times during the night to visit the showerhouse/bathrooms. So I got to see a lovely crescent moon and thought to myself that this was worth it. She would go back to sleep and Leo would wake up. Mike slept like a rock the whole night. Good, because I did not. But I expected this sort of thing going into this weekend.

We went down to the beach, which was a sand beach created by the seventy thousand tons of sand that had to be removed from the holes in the ground to find the juicy payload of gravel. The park department took the sand and made a beach, a nice beach, actually, and clean. We got to the beach and there were only two other families there. One nondescript group of fellow campers, and one mom and kids group that demonstrated first hand the effects of meth. It was sad. But only the beginning of the people watching we got to experience.

Kids played, adults stood knee deep in the water and chatted. It was nice to stand in the water, even though it was a brown lake. It wasn't mud bottomed, but sand, and that helped. It also didn't smell completely of fish. Leo was in a mei-tai carrier I made out of swimsuit fabric, and he was happy. But I didn't want him to burn so we left after a few hours and went back to make lunch. I sent lunch with Trisha back to the beach and then Leo and I hung out at the campground.

It got hot. Really hot.

So we drove around. Visited La Grange, Missouri, home of "Terrible's Mark Twain Casino." I almost took a picture but I was just too hot. Withering heat. But Leo got a nap in the air conditioned van and I got some peace and quiet.

I got back to find a sunburned husband and Sophia. Maeve, of course, was tan and fabulous, but Sophia was pink. Thunderstorm clouds were beginning to build and Trisha's phone showed they were, yes, heading our way. So we played a little Uno and waited for the rain.

Oh, it rained. A couple of hard drips and then BAM. The pavilion blew away. We rushed to the girls' tent to pull our daughters out and bring them to relative safety. Every other family went to their cars, especially after the other two extra tents blew away (each family had two tents except Trisha, who only has one child--the 12 year old down the street got his own, for instance; the 7-9 year old girls had our second one; and the two 6 year old boys shared another).

The Wissingers stayed in their tent.

Sophia sat on the air mattress crying. Maeve got into her sleeping bag and then asked to get into pajamas. Leo could sense the stress in the atmosphere and started to cry. And Mike and I? We held up the tent. We have a basic 3 season tent with fiberglass poles and the wind whipped and twisted it around. Our van was 15 feet away but might as well have been in another county. The storm was here. There was no getting around it or through it.

It started to ease up--just straight rain coming down, no more wind--and we peered out the screen to see the girls' tent, completely collapsed in a sad heap. Nothing we could do about it now. We waited another 5 minutes or so and then I got myself out of the tent. Mary and I went over to the girls' tent to inspect the damage. I don't know what everyone else was doing, because I got into the lump of nylon taffeta and started pulling things out.

Miraculously, Sophia's stuff was nothing more than damp. Two other girls fared about the same--sleeping bags went to the dryer at the shower house to get fluffed, maybe a pillow got some water. But one girl's stuff was at the bottom end of a slight incline and everything was sitting in water. A pool of water, because after the rain got in the tent, the waterproof floor held it there. Sopping.

We cleaned stuff up and Mike and the two other dads who were there already (Eric still hadn't arrived) inspected the tents. The girls' tent is also a three-season fiberglass pole deal, but even cheaper than ours (it was bought in an emergency a few years back when we got to the campground and realized we'd left the tent poles to our other tent at home). And one of the poles had snapped.

Not the end of the world, though. Mike and Steven and Brent made plans to fix it and a shopping list was created. Mike and I were going to head to Quincy, Illinois, about 10 miles away, to get duct tape, hose clips, after sun lotion, and tortillas. You know, the typical camping shopping list.