One year in college, four of us went on a bike trip over Easter break. (That’s when there used to be Easter, not spring, breaks.) We left from the home of one of the guys, starting out blithely, feeling free, despite packs on both bikes and backs. We were having fun, an adventure. It rained; we got wet.
Got to the campsite and put up our tents, surrounded by and dwarfed by campers, RV’s, people with chairs, grills, fridges, radios, televisions, chain saws. A school bus in a second incarnation as a motel-sized camper pulled into the slot next to us. We felt virtuous and pure in our little tents, having arrived under lots of pedal power (these were not my husband’s high-tech bikes), eating around a little campfire. Some music went on seemingly all night. In the morning, we were pure, virtuous, damp and tired. It kept raining.
We struck out on our bikes in the morning, got colder, wetter, felt less virtuous, thought more about eating, about getting warm and dry. That evening we spent a long time in a laundromat with a cross-section of humanity, drying off as many clothes as we could spare, getting warm(er) and dry(er). Some of us developed sniffles. We went back to our tents. It rained.
I don’t remember how many days we actually rode and camped; probably only a couple, although it seemed like a week. Eventually we phoned our friend’s father. He picked us up and took us back to their house. We ate and slept well. We still felt virtuous, but even better, we felt warm and dry. Someone developed a cold, but we’d had an adventure that would make a good story when we got back to college. Eventually the rain stopped, too late for us.
This, that and the other thing 