After five hours in the car, we reached the pullout and began our trek. My uncle and cousins took the lead and we were off down the trail. I was so excited to show my husband all my backwoods skills; we crossed the river, climbed some hills, whacked at brush, and arrived at the hot springs we were seeking. After months of inactivity and gaining forty-two pounds from my pregnancy (not an ounce had I lost), I was exhausted from carrying that twenty-four-pound baby on my back for two hours while fording rivers and climbing mountains.
Paul sent me to nurse the baby while I dangled my legs in the hot pool. He set up the tent and came over to ask what we were sleeping in. I replied that I had brought a blanket. (yes, a blanket); I should have taken a clue from the frown that formed on his brow. My uncle had set up his tent and started a fire. His girls were eating something he had brought and he wasn’t hungry. Paul asked what we were eating. “Oh, I put some potatoes and tin foil in one of the pockets of the pack.” Again, that furrowed brow. “And?” he asked me. So I stomped over to the fire, wrapped the potatoes in the foil, and threw them in the fire; we ate some granola bars and waited. The temperature was dropping fast and I was wondering about my t-shirt and shorts. If you are wondering about the baby, he was good—we brought forty different things for him, including all the cloth diapers he would need for the two days of camping. (It didn’t occur to me I would have to carry them out.)
After about an hour I checked the potatoes—ROCK HARD! Okay, now Paul’s frown was beyond slight. He was mad. I was freezing, exhausted, and starving! The baby was having the time of his life; he couldn’t be happier. After all, he was nursing and completely replete. At ten o’clock my uncle and cousins crawled into bed and went to sleep. No, our potatoes were still not done, but we ate them anyway. Paul was gritting his teeth the entire time. We crawled into our tent and the temperature was at about 50 degrees. I had completely forgotten that in the mountains it gets cold at night. Hey, it was 95 degrees when we left our house, who would have thought it would get COLD! Our one worthless blanket was really lacking, so I got out of the tent and took the rain fly off and brought that in to cover us. Tristan, the baby was bundled up and snoring loudly with a happy baby look on his face. I had a raging headache, still starving, and rapidly losing all my body heat.
