Family Trips

Later, as a family, we continued to travel all around the country on the cheap. Abra will surely remember sleeping in the car in a campground in Slidell, Louisiana. I’ll bet she remembers our walk around the French Quarter (le Vieux Carré) of New Orleans the next morning, where, in a small tourist shop, she tried on a pair of sunglasses that had a false rubber nose hanging down from the frames to cover her actual nose. Only when she looked in the mirror did the mortified twelve-year old Abra realize she was wearing a rubber penis on her face!

This might have been the shop.

As a family, we pitched our tent in so many places. We camped one summer in the Everglades National Park in Florida, where large alligators slept on the sides of the roads, and the mosquitoes were so bad we left the next morning looking like we had all caught the measles. We camped at the mountain top Chisos Basin of Big Bend National Park in Texas, where all three kids terrified their parents by climbing Appetite Peak without telling us, or asking permission. It is a pile of rocks, from which, a fall could easily be fatal. At the time, Abra was twelve, TJ was only about nine, and the fifteen year old Devin was leading them ever higher, climbing up and over large bare rocks without looking back.

Appetite Peak, Chisos Basin, Big Bend National Park

At Wilson State Park in Kansas, we lay in our tent, thinking about tornados, surrounded by lightning and thunderstorms. I remember another time when we camped on St. George Island off Panama City, Florida, when the winds and rain rattled and pounded our tents all night. The next day, as we left the nearly deserted State Park, the ranger told us a small hurricane had developed in the gulf suddenly and gone by in the night without coming to shore!