Bear Scare

For the 24th of July we were able to escape the stuffy city life and enter the sprawling wilderness in a wonderful camping adventure. I am not an avid camper, but I am also not one of those girls that freak out when I get dirt under my nails. I was always excited to spend a week of my summers at girl's camp eating toasted marshmallows until I started to look like a marshmallow myself. Girl's camp was the only place I felt freedom. I mean, true freedom. The freedom to not put on ANY makeup and actually feel cool about myself. The freedom to walk around smelling like a cross between a port-a-potty and a can of OFF spray. The freedom to sing the most ridiculous songs with the most ridiculous lyrics and compound the charade with the most ridiculous dances. And believe me, you were seriously looked down upon if you did not know every word and were yelling it at the top of your lungs! For some reason, teenage girls go into some sort of trance when they enter the wilderness with a bunch of their friends. I say trance because any other week of the year they would not be caught dead dancing like a chicken, washing their hair in a dirty spring, or sitting around a table doing boondoggle for 12 hours in the day. Maybe it is something in the water- oh wait, we couldn't drink the water! Anyway, so I was all pumped up to go on our little trip UNTIL.... I stayed up late one night watching TV while Jake was at work and somehow landed on the Discovery Channel. I sat and watched about 2 hours of bear attacks, bear habits, and the recent increase of human attacks. Suddenly, hauling my little ones to a "bear habitat" and sleeping in a flimsy tent did not seem like the best idea. I was content in my city, breathing in all the pollution I could take! I did not say anything to Jake because I knew what his reaction would be, but as the day drew near I began to get more and more worried. On a side note- please understand that I know I was being completely ridiculous. I was going to sleep in a camp ground with hundreds of people around on the 24th weekend. I knew the chances of a bear eating my guts was tiny but the fear remained. I told Jake and got the reaction was I was fully anticipating. Eye roll.... sigh.... staring at me hoping that I would say "Just kidding!" But no, I was serious. That is when the laughing began. He laughed, and laughed, and laughed. Then he went and sat on the couch... and laughed some more. Then he just ignored the subject until the day before we were to leave. This is were my cute husband steps in. He had called around to some places and found a trailer that we could rent.

It was a tent trailer so the bear could still rip right through it but it somehow made me feel better. If the bear was going to make a meal out of me, I was going to make it as hard on him as possible. Now instead eating me off the ground, the bear would have to pull up a chair to dine at the 5-foot-high table I was sleeping on. Ridiculous, I KNOW! In the end, it turned out that the trailer was a huge blessing. Not only for warding off ground-level-eating bears, but it rained hard the first day so we were able to stay somewhere warm, with a stove, and still function without becoming water logged. It was a great place for the kids to take naps, escape the hot sun, and it let Mason roam for a little bit. Steve and Jake did not have the greatest luck with fishing but what they did get was BIG! We are happy to be home, with our warm showers. And I am happy to report that all the bears are still roaming around with their bellies empty of any of the Hancock family!

For the first time ever, I actually listened to Jake about packing light and only brought one pair of pant, which, of course, had to be the pair I sat in a fresh smore.