Instant Karma, Parkour Beetle, and It's a Small World After All..

It actually turned into summer a few days early here in Oregon!! It's been almost 80 and sunny since July 1st, and here it is the 4th and still sunny! Weird! Anyway, we took advantage of the weather and went backpacking!

Headed out to the Clackamas River for a fairly flat hike at a low elevation so at least we wouldn't freeze overnight. Nick and I had been talking about an overnight backpack for a couple weeks but the weather kept turning nasty. Since it was now a weekend, we talked Stan into going, too. Lucky thing for us, too-- I had been reading the map to the trailhead upside-down and would have been about 25 miles off on locating it!!

So we did arrive, and headed out, trudging up every slight incline as if it were a mountain. About halfway to our destination, I started getting a blister and stopped to put on some moleskin. Stan HATES stopping for anything while hiking. I sat down on a kinda tippy log. While waiting Nick sat next to me and Stan was on the far end of the same log. When I was ready, I got up, Nick got up, and the log shifted and sent Stan rolling off backward!! He ended up in a berry bush patch like a turtle on its back--arms and legs flailing as he had the full backpack on! He was kinda grumpy about it until we got him up, relatively unscathed. Then he laughingly admitted he should have seen that coming. He sat in that spot purposely trying to tip the log up with me on it, but Nick had sat down first and it wouldn't move!! Instant Karma's gonna get you every time, lol!

Once at our charming little campsite by the river, we made dinner and hung out. We were greatly entertained by a wacky beetle that wanted to hang out in the middle of camp. Stan had used a stick to stir dinner with, and this beetle found the stick and absolutely WALLOWED all over it! Then he'd go plow directly through nearby sticks and rocks and barkdust to check out the other sticks in the area. None of them were apparently as exciting, so shorly he'd barrel directly back to the yummy stick and wallow some more! It was amazing the direct line over, under, and through everything he would take! Eventually Stan moved our Parkour Beetle and his favorite stick out of camp so we didn't accidently step on him.

It was amazing how it was a sunny 4th of July weekend and almost no one else was out hiking there. While we were camping, we only had one hiker go by on the trail. He gave a perfunctory "hi", and Nick said "hello". Then they both stopped and went, "WAIT!" "WHAT?" "WHAT?" "REALLY?" "HEY!!!" Turns out Nick knows him from PSU where they are both Geology majors, LOL!!!

So... It was a really nice time, though somehow I tweaked my back and I'm REALLY sore this morning. Not good timing as I'm leaving this afternoon for a week long mission trip with teens from church. Ce la vie...