Packing up

Because Lake Stevens falls at the end of the 4th of July weekend, we’d made plans to go camping at a state park about a half-hour away from the race site. Initially, it was going to be four of us: M & J plus T & I  (and of course the pupsters) but a family emergency prevented M & J from joining us, so it became just our little family. I was of course disappointed that our friends wouldn’t be able to join us, but T & I haven’t gone camping on our own very often, so I thought it would still be fun.

So, we got up early on Thursday in the hope of beating the holiday traffic out of town. Usually we borrow Susan’s larger car when we go camping, but this weekend she was using it for her own camping trip so we needed to load all of our crap into our two-door Saturn. We have a soft-rooftop carrier for extra cargo, that is supposed to be able to be attached without a roof rack, but we hadn’t had to use it on our car yet. Naturally, the directions for it had gone missing so we were left to make sense of the pieces that we had and somehow attach the carrier to the car with them.

An hour later, I was scouring the internet for directions while T was jury-rigging a rack for the car out of clothesline. Luckily T has a sailing background and is really good with knots, so he actually managed to put something together than worked reasonably well. Then all we had to do was load up all of our crap into the car. Before: (damn, we have a lot of crap!)

And after:

With the dogs crammed into half of the backseat next to a cooler, we hit the road. In all of the craziness of getting the car loaded we had to go back for some forgotten items, which of course landed us in the holiday traffic we were trying to avoid. C’est la vie!