We stayed in Andrew’s cousin Ken’s trailer instead of pitching a tent. For some reason this seemed easier. By the time we had finished unloading the van and eating dinner, though, it was dark and we hadn’t been able to figure out how to get the electricity in the trailer working so we had to get ready for bed in the dark.
I held a flashlight in my hand and bent over to search through our bags to find pyjamas for everyone while Andrew wrangled the girls. When I stood up my head connected with the corner of an overhanging cabinet I had been unfortunate enough not to notice.
In short: blood, swelling, massive headache. And it was only our first day.
Other than that and the occasional bug bite…and the Zander boys popping a tire and second degree burns covering half the back of certain boys in our family (I won’t mention any names—if only, if only there was some modern invention to prevent such a thing from happening…oh wait…sunblock), a few people bonking their heads on overhanging rocks while climbing up waterfalls…nothing bad happened.
We played Rummikub with Andrew’s parents that evening after we had gotten the girls to sleep and I had sufficiently iced my head. Karen and I had a hard round—we had drawn all the tiles and still couldn’t go down. It was so sad and we begged to start a new round and because we’re spoiled Andrew and Reid gave in.
Interestingly enough Andrew’s family plays Rummikub with house rules and those house rules are virtually identical to the house rules I grew up with, which is nice. Andrew and I both enjoy Rummikub and never even discussed the rules when we started playing together. I hadn’t even realized that I grew up playing house rules until I played with some friends in Egypt a few weeks ago. That game was rather confusing for me. I think everyone should play by our house rules, except that because we play only after we’ve accumulated 50 points we apparently run the risk of drawing all the tiles and never being able to play.
That’s only ever happened to me once, though, so I still think our rules are good rules. The next round went much better.
We went to bed, freezing cold, and fully expecting to be woken up early in the morning due to sunshine or birds or babies or some other natural alarm clock, but we weren’t. Our whole family slept in until Miriam cried out to nurse. I heard Karen honk the horn on her way out of camp to go grocery shopping so I woke Andrew up to see what time it was since we were supposed to go hiking. It was 9:30!
I don’t think anyone has ever slept in until 9:30 in the whole history of Grover trips—and there have been 17 years of them. That’s right, year marks the heptadecennial anniversary of Heiss Family Grover Trips…and we spent the first morning sleeping in.
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