Maggotfest!

This week we drove 12 hours to Lake Tahoe, CA for the White cousin reunion, lovingly known as Maggotfest. One night the relations were discussing where the nickname maggots came from, and there were a few different stories. The most generally agreed-upon source of the name seemed to take place at a reunion of yore when the cousins zipped themselves into sleeping bags head first and had a race and squirmed/flopped all over the place. So, maggots=Jeff’s cousins on the White side, and grubs=children of those cousin-maggots, or the second cousins of Jay and Rose. Delicious.

It was my first official Maggotfest (I was too sick/pregnant with Rose to attend the last one). We weren’t going to go at all thanks to our expensive new home air system, but the dear cousins “took up a collection” for us and paid for our gas for the drive. It was SO KIND of them! I had only ever met 5 of the maggots and grubs in attendance, so it took a bit for me to straighten out who was whose. The cousins jointly rented a cabin on Lake Tahoe and convened there from Wednesday, July 31st-Sunday, August 4th. We drove down on Wednesday but ended up leaving on Friday afternoon because Jay and Rose got sick and we didn’t want to contaminate the rest of the cousins. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting and bonding with the famed maggot clan and their grubs for that day and a half though. We practiced communal camera-ing, so I only have a fraction of the photos taken. Rest assured, the others will be posted if and when I get my hands on them.

Best car toy ever: this cute little 3 bears dress-up puzzle. You can change their shirts, pants, and facial expressions (heads). Rose played with it for nearly half of the total driving time, on the way there and back.

And of course we got out our homemade cardboard car desks and the (not homemade) magnetic wood paper dolls too. I love listening to my kids entertain themselves on long drives. They only needed Sesame Street on the way home when they were sick and limp and moan-y.

Here’s The Cabin. It was a very unique shape, with peaks and points poking out all over the place, and it was built on a steep hill, so 2/3 of its mass was down below. But it fit all 32 of us…barely! There were 16 adults and 16 kids in attendance. The 4 of us shared a room with Steph and Layne. The room had bunk beds with queen size mattresses on top and bottom. We wedged Layne’s crib between the bunk beds and the wall, and Jay and Rose got the teeny triangle of space behind the crib:

We did not sleep very much. There was always a child or two up crying, and every time I rolled over, the bunk bed creaked and squeaked so loudly it woke me up. But who goes to a family reunion to sleep anyways?

The first night we stayed up kind of late listening to Jeff’s Uncle Boo tell stories. He has such a collection of fascinating true stories from his LIFE, and he tells them so well—he is a college professor after all. I was entranced. And I do not know how Jeff’s dad Dan is still alive after all the things his older brothers did to him as a child.

On Thursday morning, Helen and I went on a run. Our plan was to run for half an hour. It’s been so long since I ran with anyone that I totally stopped paying attention to where we were going and just enjoyed good conversation [make that good, gasping conversation—Lake Tahoe is at 6000 ft elevation after all]. Well 30 minutes came and went, and we discovered that we weren’t quite sure how to get back to the cabin. We took a few turns and asked for directions twice before free-forming it through the woods and miraculously emerging on the right street. Breakfast, sweet breakfast.

The first order of business after breakfast on Thursday morning was a hike. It was more like a slow amble through the woods because the various children fanned out in front of us would stop to play or examine sticks, rocks, pine cones, etc. every few seconds. It was most enjoyable.

At some point along the walk, we decided that pine cone bowling would be a great game to play with the kids later. So I roped some giant pine cones to my pack.

This is Helen, her boy Zeke, and Rose playing in the creek. The 2 and 3-year-olds did NOT want to leave the creek. Cute little blondies.

Sam, Steph, Layne, and Mary sunning themselves on the cabin’s scenic back porch.

I live for views like this.

Thursday afternoon, BEACH! Lake Tahoe is such a bright, blue, CLEAN lake. It was very windy when we were at the beach, but the sun-warmed sand kept us from getting too cold.

Buried treasures. We turned these girls into mermaids by shaping the sand around them.

Love that ponytail.

It took days to get all of the sand out of Jay’s ears and hair.

Eventually the adults took turns braving the burrrrr. The water wasn’t exceptionally cold, but that wind made getting back out again a lock-jaw, teeth-chattering experience.

Bobbing in the gentle waves was fun.

Sun-soaked, sanded kids watching a quick movie segment to regain their strength.

The next 24 hours are not pictured. What we did: after dinner on Thursday we had some fiddling. It was terrifying. I hadn’t picked up my violin in at least 2 or 3 months before that evening, but for some reason I brought it and joined in with Helen and Mary’s fiddle tunes. They kindly let me play the top line which only had like 3 or 4 notes repeated over and over in it. Even though it was elementarily easy music, I am NOT a performer OR a sight-reader, and I was wobbly and uncertain up there the whole time. But then again, that’s how I always feel whenever I play my violin within earshot of anyone but my kids, whether I’m sight-reading or well-practiced. Plus I forgot my neck rest so I had to cram a pair of balled-up socks into my shirt collar to support my violin from below. Hunchback of Notre Shaina. Thank goodness for the ice cream that lured us back to the kitchen after about half an hour of fiddle-twiddling.

After the ice cream feast, we had an impromptu but apparently traditional Squirm. The kids all wrapped up in sleeping bags and blankets and just went to town, flopping and rolling all over each other in that little bit of floor space in front of the couch. Jeff and I happened to be sitting right there when the Squirm started, so we were mobbed. It was hilarious and slightly overwhelming.

Friday morning we went to D.L. Bliss State Park and hiked the Lighthouse Trail. It was about a mile out to the shore of Lake Tahoe on a beautiful rocky evergreeny trail. We arrived almost an hour after everyone else because Rose barfed in the car on the way and we had to turn back to clean her up. We thought maybe it was a fluke barf, like not a sickness, so we went on ahead and did the hike.

The water was SO BLUE! It reminds me of Finding Nemo, when the fish in the tank ask Nemo what the big blue ocean is like: “uhh…big…and blue?”

The “lighthouse” was rather underwhelming.

If there hadn’t been a plaque labeling the lighthouse, we’d never have known that’s what this shack was supposed to be. I’m not sure why a lighthouse would be necessary on a lake anyways.

We attempted another of our traditional mid-adventure family self-portraits:

Attempt #1

Attempt #2

I don’t think the kids were feeling very well, because they were very lethargic on the whole walk.

 

During the drive from Bliss back to the cabin, Rose barfed again, and while she was finishing, Jay started up too. Nightmarish. Two kids barfing all over themselves simultaneously, in the car. Executive decision: let’s get out of here! We did not want to take our two explosive children back into that crowded cabin and contaminate all of the other people there. So we dashed in, loaded up our bags, cleaned up the kids, grabbed some sandwiches, and hit the road toward home around 3pm. The family was very helpful and understanding. It was a wrench leaving them a day early.

The drive through north-central California and Oregon was not on the usual 2-lane interstate highway with exits and a speed limit of 70. It was a dashed or double yellow line, 55 mph speed limit kind of a road, which was better for our frequent emergency-puke stops. But we were stuck behind a slow RV forEVER, and when we finally passed them and left ‘em in the dust, we had to pull over for some more vomit maintenance, and they passed us back again. I bet they thought we had bladder issues. If only!

Smoke from the wildfires made the sunset insane.

We drove all the way to Klamath Falls, Oregon (6 hours—about halfway home) before it got dark, stopping two or three times to catch and clean up more barf. Then we decided it would be wise to stay in a cheap motel overnight. A few local price inquiries landed us in the A-1 Budget Motel. Jeff and I have stayed in some very nasty hostels in our time. But those were all in Europe. We’ve never come close to something as gross as those hostels in the USA. Well, the A-1 came dangerously close. Stains, lumpy un-vacuumed carpet, mismatched yellowy sheets, awful polyester bedspreads, patchy walls, a LIVE WIRE dangling from a disconnected smoke detector, bare light blubs, the list goes on and on. I comforted myself with three facts: 1. I brought my own pillow, 2. it still wasn’t worse than Barcelona and Prague, 3. at least there were no bed bugs! It was the perfect place to stop with pukey kids, actually. They couldn’t possibly make the place worse!

Am I a bad mother for giving my kids the bed with the puce colored top sheet? They didn’t use the sheet—we brought in their blankets. But still. I was so relieved to find that our bed had matching, if grayish, top and fitted sheets (although there was a permanent marker scribble on one corner).

There was this funky little kitchenette tucked away in the back of the room.

We actually slept better in this manky place than we did in the full-to-bursting cabin back at Tahoe. Once I closed my eyes, I managed to imagine away all of the nasties (Anne Shirley-style) and pretend I was in a Marriott because, in spite of its cosmetic challenges, the room smelled just like any other hotel room.

We took our time in the morning and tried to feed the kids a little oatmeal. Jay’s bounced. Rose’s didn’t. At least one child was on the mend. We hit the road at 8am. When it was my turn to drive, I somehow missed a crucial fork in the road and an hour later we realized that we were no longer on highway 97. We were headed up toward Mt. Hood on 26. It was too late to turn back, so we embraced it and took a very scenic drive through an Indian reservation and straight around Mt. Hood’s base before connecting onto 82 at Hood River. We enjoyed the views, but my unplanned detour added nearly 2 hours to our drive!

The road was walled in on both sides with these tall green pines.

Meanwhile, POOR limp Jay kept on hurling—we stopped twice more to clean him up, and he was in his last clean t-shirt by the time he fell into an exhausted head-flopping slumber.

Contrast the above with the below:

Remember how highway 97 was closed between Toppenish and Goldendale due to wildfires last week? Well, it had reopened by the time we were driving back from Tahoe. Check out those burns.

It was sad to see all those black smoking trees after emerging so recently from the thriving greenery around Mt Hood.

Sleepy cheeks

We finally made it home at 4pm. Another family adventure for the archives.