A Spontaneous Weekend Adventure...Warwick Style.

            Warwick weekend adventures always start out the same. The curtain draws away on two people staring each other down across the kitchen table. There are 48 hours tick, tick, ticking away on the clock on the stove, no plan, and an overly stimulated six year-old boy staring desperately up at his parents. The boy has a look in his eye that clearly states that he’s about damn ready to take the lead in this.

            One of the parents speaks.

            “What do you want to do?”

            “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

            The boy waits, a bead of sweat falling over his eyebrow.

            “I asked you first,” the husband says.

            “But, I decided last time.”

            “Either way. I asked you first.”

            An audible sigh is breathed just three feet up from the floor. The boy grabs a grapefruit, a cutting board and a small knife. He walks over to the table and melts into the chair. School is over. His brothers and sister, all older and more independent, have already started their week-end plans and here he sits. Again. He decides to dig in to the fruit to wait them out. This scene is familiar to him. It is just like the last time his parents tried to plan a spontaneous adventure.

           My husband and I have been together for years. These mini-adventures are not new to us. Nor is our inability to plan them together. This weekend, along with two other weekends during the year, holds major significance to us. No it’s not Memorial Day, nor is it our anniversary, or our child’s birthday. It is simply the last weekend before Spring Work. I say that with a capital S and P because Spring Work is the beginning of our busiest time of the year on the farm, and it is also the last opportunity that we have to be spontaneous for a very, very, very long time.

            Therefore, we wanted to get started planning straight away. During the week prior we mentioned it in passing – but not yet in front of the child.

            “Any ideas, dear?” I ask.

            “Camping?” He offers tentatively.

            “Sure. Maybe you should check the weather.”

            “I did. It looks okay so far.”

            “Great.”

            By Thursday, I realize that my husband has been thinking about this a great deal because he has decided to come into lunch and address the subject head on.

            “We need a plan.”  

            “I thought we were camping.”

            “Oh yeah. Well, of course, but where? I mean the weather’s not looking good.”

            “I thought you checked that.”

            “I did.”

            “You said it looked fine.”

            “It did, here. But it’s not so great in the mountains.”

            “We’re camping in the mountains?”

            “Well, unless you want to camp in Lewiston, but I know you hate camping in the city, so I just assumed that was out.”

            “Well, I do hate that.”

            He waits, tossing the ball of suggestion in my court.

            “How about south?” I smile.  

            “That’s Lewiston,” he clarifies.

            I’m pretty sure he knows what I mean. I meant even further south. I let it go.

            “Well, Lewiston is fine with me if that’s where you want to go,” I concede.

            “I told you to decide,” he smiled.  

            “But I decided last time.”

            Lunch is OVER!

            By Friday at 1230 PM, lunch has been eaten in silence, and we both know that we have a very big problem. No longer can we decide separately on this issue. We have to find a way to gel these plans together between the two of us, and ASAP.  The school bus will be here anytime and our son will be fired up and wanting to know when we are leaving and where we are going even before he even hits the front step.

            “How about Seattle,” my dear husband quickly says. “We can get a hotel, and we could go to dinner at The Crab Pot. We could get fish and bring it home.”

            At this point I’m counting the words he has just spewed out. He’s added like 25 words to this conversation, so I know this suggestion is now a subject of serious consideration.

            “Seattle’s good,” I say. “But it will be a quick trip. You know how you hate long car rides.”

            “Oh, I’m thinking of leaving tonight,” says he.

            “Really,” I laugh, looking at the clock. “And you just decided to tell me. The other kids won’t even leave tonight until 6:30.”

            “Yeah, I know,” he shrugs. “And Jack is counting on camping.”

            I nod my head, but hold my tongue. I like Seattle and my dear husband knows it. I like fish, and we have not had a lot of it lately. And, I love The Crab Pot. I laugh. He tossed that damn ball back in my court with a carrot attached. Damn, he’s good. 

            “So, what do you think?” he asks.

            “I wonder how were going to pay for it?” I say. “I can’t pull two nights stay in a hotel plus fish and dinner out of my budget.”

            “Oh,” he says.

            Game changer!

            The bus has to honk its horn because neither of us noticed it was there. As I run for the door I hear him call after me.

            “I’m going to finish my chores. I’ll be in within one hour and we’ll make a decision.”

            “Okay.”

            Suddenly, with the thought of one little boy between us, we are again on the same team.

            However, six hours and two beers later we are still sitting across the table, starting at one another while our son cuts up his grapefruit and patiently waits us out. No one had packed. Not for sun, not for snow, and certainly not for Seattle. I’ve made no food for camping, nor do I even know if our sleeping bags are clean. No wood has been chopped for a campfire. No hotel has been accommodated. I'm about to break out a bottle of rum and build my own fire out back!

            “How about Quinn’s Hot Springs,” I add hopefully.

            “No, it’s too late now to drive that far.”

            I slap my hand on the table and start laughing.

            “That’s not as far as Seattle,” I say.

            “Yeah,” he says, “but there’s no point in adding more options to this. We have enough already.”

            “Then let’s go to Lewiston,” I say. “It’s only an hour and a half away. I’ll be fine camping there. And Jack just wants to camp.”

            “Okay, but we’ll have to leave in the morning. I don’t want to set up a tent in the dark.”

            “Okay, fine,” I agree, happy to just have a plan. “Tomorrow morning it is.”

            I look to my husband, thankfully that we have made a plan without giving up, or worse, getting in an argument over who was trying to meet the others needs more.

            “Should I make food?” I ask. “Or are we just going to stop at the store. I baked chicken for dinner. We could throw that in the cooler. And I could make potato salad.”

            “Let’s just stop. It’ll be easier that way.”

            “Cool.”  

            By 830 on Saturday morning, I’m still in my jammies and have only had a half a cup of coffee by the time my darling has the car packed.

            “By the way, did you put that pop on the shelf in the garage?” he asks, stuffing the car full of camping gear.

            “Yeah,” I yawn. “I put it in there last fall after we were done camping. I was trying to keep it from the kids.”

            “It froze over the winter and exploded on our tent.”

            “Oh, crap. Can we still use the tent?”

            “We’ll have to,” he says. “We have nothing else to sleep in.”

            I tell Jack to load his stuff in the car, and I start packing my own. My husband comes in the house and I tell him I’m going to shower.

            “Shower? We don’t have time for that.”

            “We'll make time,” I tell him. "It's Saturday for goodness sake." 

            “You seen the roasters dear?” he calls while I’m washing my hair.

            “No. Have you checked the camping shelf?”

            “Yeah, not there. I checked the camper too.”

            “I’ll look when I’m done.”

            “How much longer? We need to get this show on the road?”

            As long as I want, I mouth to myself. It took a whole week just to get this far!

            “I’m almost done,” I say sweetly.

            I wash, dry and race out to the camper, eagle-eying the minutes that are passing on the clock. I know he’s got 9:00 A.M. on his silent radar. If we don’t leave by then the whole weekend will be rushed and ruined. I found the roasters. They were in the camper on the floor, right where they always are.

            “Don’t forget flashlights and batteries,” he says. “Oh, and a lighter. Do we have newspaper for starting a fire?”

            I gave up the coffee and have started counting his words again. One hour later we are in the van, with a sticky tent, some sleeping bags, no food and a very excited little boy. We are only three miles down the road when my husband realizes that in his desire to get this weekend rolling expediently he has forgotten to eat breakfast and totally spaced packing his own clothes.

            “Where’s that chicken?” he smiles. “I’ll just eat that.”

            “I left it in the fridge.”

            “What? Why? I thought we made that for camping. ”

            “You said we were camping in the city. You said we’d just stop at the store.”            

            “The city? See. I know it.  You don’t want to go there. Where do you want to go? I’m open for anything. Just tell me.”

            The curtain closes on a small boy, playing with his beanie babies in the backseat, rolling his eyes and sighing audibly.

~Postscript~

           

            You, the reader, exhausted and now completely cured of any desire to camp this summer, are asking yourself, when pray tell are the other two week-ends in the year that are so super stinking important to these people for their spontaneous weekend adventure? The next one is the weekend just before Harvest, and the other one is just before Fall Work. And yes, we are already planning. Both of us, separately. Our son has already made plans as well. Only he's made plans with another family.