WSOP Road Trip 2014 Day 5

Objective: Drive approximately 8 hours from our campground near Golden, CO to the vicinity of Zion National Park. Find a place to camp on near the park.

Optional: Find a place to swim.

I woke around 3:30AM. Despite the fact that I was burrowed inside of my sleeping bag with the top pulled over my head, I was still shivering. I tried a few times to go back to sleep, but it just wasn’t happening.

At Emily’s advice, I brought a hat and gloves with me, even though I couldn’t imagine it getting cold enough, even overnight, for me to need them when camping in the summer. Well, I needed them, they were in the car, and Jerica had the keys in her tent.

Reluctantly, I shivered my way over to where she and the kids were sleeping, bent down close to the door, and whispered her name a few times. Walter started crying, and that woke Jerica, so mission accomplished I guess?

She passed me the car keys but also told me that if I wanted we could also just leave and get a really early start on the day. Even with a hat on I was still unbearably cold, so I got the car packed up, hopefully buying her an extra hour or so of sleep, and then roused her again when only her kids and her tent remained to be packed.

The younger boys barely even stirred when she carried them, sleeping bags and all, out to their car seats. Henry woke up enough to walk to the car, but quickly fell back asleep.

I’d actually hoped to sleep a bit in the car myself, with Jerica driving (we’d reversed this arrangement on past days), but dawn in the Rockies was too pretty a sight to pass up and it was also a rare opportunity for us to talk without constant interruption from the kids.

They woke hungry and grumpy around 7. We found a place to get breakfast and coffee, after which I volunteered to take over the driving. Even with a few cups of coffee in me, though, I was having trouble keeping my attention on the road, so within an hour I pulled over and asked Jerica to relieve me again.

By now the kids were fully awake and totally bored. The drive through Utah is a beautiful one, but the scenery gets old after a while, especially for kids. She offered to get them a treat from the gas station where we’d stopped. I stayed out in the car with Walter, who for once didn’t freak out when his mother left his sight, while Henry and Oliver spent an inordinate amount of time making a selection.

At one point Henry came out to the car and asked my advice on whether he should buy a toy gun that made cool noises but didn’t actually shoot anything. It was a little odd for him to consult with me like this, and I deduced that Jerica must have suggested it, which means that there was probably a right answer to this question. “Well, it seems to me like you guys already have a lot of guns, so I think if I were you I would get something different.” A few minutes later the boys emerged with popsicles, and Jerica later thanked me, so I guess I got that one right.

Of course once he saw his brothers with popsicles, Walter started shrieking. Jerica was one step ahead and had a treat for him. She was not, however, two steps ahead, and soon enough his face, hands, and shirt were covered in melted popsicle. It was one of several occasions on the trip when I thought to myself, “I sure am glad this isn’t my problem.”

We found a playground where she could clean the baby off and the boys could run around for a while. We had lunch there as well, but the boys were as grumpy as ever as soon as the car started moving again.

The general plan for the night had been to camp somewhere near Zion National Park. We hadn’t gotten any further with the planning. We were far too late to reserve anything, and a summer weekend is not a time to expect to get a walk-up camping spot at one of the country’s most-visited parks. Even a lot of the campgrounds in the vicinity were booked.

Emily came through with a state park about half an hour from Zion. It was first-come, first-served and didn’t seem like it would be overcrowded. It was even on a lake, which meant swimming would be available (warmest water in Utah, the website advertised). It sounded perfect, and we told the kids that after a long and boring drive they could get in the water and we’d finally be to a spot where we could settle in for a bit. The plan was to spend the whole next day in Zion, which would mean minimal driving, and that was music to their ears.

The 3G coverage was spotty in the desert, so it was about two hours before we got the update from Emily. Some recent reviews of the campground reported a huge number of cockroaches that come out at night and get in all your things. And apparently the warm lake water was a breeding ground for bacteria to which about one-in-five swimmers responded badly, breaking out in uncomfortable rashes that lasted for days.

The spotty internet also made it hard to research other options. The best we could find was another campground about an hour further from Zion, which would require breaking both promises to the kids: no swimming, and several hours of driving the next day.

Jerica and I tried to discuss this quietly, but there are no secrets in a small car. She asked whether I thought the bacteria was really that much of a concern, and I told her: “Not for me. I’ll be rid of you all in 48 hours. But if I were you, I wouldn’t risk it. They’re antsy enough without painful, itchy rashes.”

Emily came through yet again, though, with a secret swimming hole on the Virgin River about twenty minutes from the campground. I don’t know how she found this place – it must have been a message board or website dedicated to sharing little-known swimming spots – but it was exactly what we needed. We’d have to brave the cockroaches, but not the bacteria.

There was a new complication, tough. We needed to go to the campground before the swimming hole to insure that we got a site. We had some trouble finding the state park, which meant that it was after 5 by the time we claimed our site. The gate to the park closed at 9 – NO EXCEPTIONS, a sign by the entranced growled – it would take at least twenty minutes to drive to this swimming hole if we didn’t have any trouble finding it (the directions included more than one unsigned, unpaved road), and we still had to stop at a grocery store for dinner food as well.

Thankfully everything went smoothly, we found the swimming hole without a hitch, and it was awesome. The only other people there about as authentically local as you could ask for: two sunburned women in ill-fitting bikinis, their bushy-bearded, beer-bellied husbands wading waste deep with beers in one hand and cigarettes in the other, and a little girl whose father’s tender attentiveness was a bit discordant with his non-stop ingestion of alcohol and tobacco. We speculated that ours was probably the first Virginia license plate to grace the dusty “parking lot”.

Jerica grew up on the Snake River in Idaho and was close to working as a river rafting guide. The ocean makes her nervous, but she’s at home around a river and a bit dismayed that none of her sons is a confident swimmer. She tested them in ways that would have made me uncomfortable had they been my children. Actually they made me uncomfortable anyway, but as she was the parent and the more experienced adult where rivers were concerned, I did some more tongue-biting.

This ultimately led to an awkward situation for me when Oliver, who was floating downstream on his back and had only to flip over on to his stomach to find his feet, started panicking as he was pulled towards a small rapids. They wouldn’t have killed him, but they would have beaten him up and scared him pretty thoroughly. I, fully clothed, was about to dash into the river after him, but one of the local guys dropped his cigarette and beat me to the heroic act of plucking the shrieking boy from the current. I got an awfully judgmental glare as he handed Oliver over to me.

The spot was otherwise a huge hit and ended our day on a very happy note. We got back to the campground with time to spare, ate a late dinner, and turned in. I spotted a few cockroaches around the bathroom, but not a disgusting amount, and never once saw one in the vicinity of our tents.