Not as great of a night's sleep, but still respectable for camping. I was so relieved. I get extremely emotional and short-tempered when I'm sleep-deprived, and I didn't want to be losing my head with Aislynn all weekend, so I had been praying hard leading up to this. God was even teaching me faith in this trip. I hadn't even bothered to pray for the simple "to be able to sleep," I was praying for God to override the horrible way I expected to feel. I need to trust God to meet even the basic needs, knowing that He cares that much about me as His child.
Bryan had mentioned yesterday that he had wanted to detour the trip home to go rock climbing with Adam today. He had said we'd leave after breakfast and still aim to get home early afternoon, so I was game. Breakfast was cereal and Costco muffins.
Unfortunately, I did even worse involving Aislynn in tear-down than I did in setup of camp. She was playing, and I saw it as my chance to get the tent down and car packed as quickly as possible. I was almost finished loading our stuff in the car before Bryan had started bringing down their tent. But I did bring Aislynn over to sweep off the tarp and help fold it. I think it's important to show kids the work involved in making a camping trip happen to encourage gratefulness and a can-do attitude. Clearly I need to still work on patience.
We loaded the car and headed north to Castle Rock State Park. We were not getting home by early afternoon, but oh well, definitely worth it. We had dropped off my car at the mechanic to get it looked at, so I arranged for Amy to pick it up for me since they would be closed by the time we arrived home. We had a short hike to the climbing area.
Adam and Bryan did most of the climbing, and I manned Bryan's camera, taking pictures of them and the four girls (Avery, Aislynn and Adam's two: Annalouise - 9 and Julia - 5). The girls each got a turn to climb, and then Adam gave me his harness to do a climb. Adam didn't have any climbing shoes big enough for me, so I had to climb in my running shoes, making it a little more difficult to get a grip on the rock. But they had outlined a good, mildly challenging, climbing path. I encounter a climbing wall about once every two years, and enjoy it, but never enough to pursue the sport more diligently. I enjoyed climbing actual rock more and oddly found myself a little more courageous knowing there wasn't some kind of man made pattern to figure out for a proper ascent. I was satisfied to see my increasing ability to avoid panicking in a tight spot and not get into an "I can't" mentality.
When I got near the top, I knew I was done, so I gave Bryan the "you have me, right?" call. He said yes, so I let go to start my descent. The reason I had Adam's harness is that he only had one big enough for an average-size adult male. So since Adam had no harness, Bryan had to belay me. Bryan weighs 144 lbs and has a 29-inch waist, and he barely fit into the smaller adult harness Adam had. I weigh a fair deal more than Bryan. So when I was preparing to let go, Bryan had taken a few more steps back to make sure and have me fully in view. When I did let go, Bryan actually slid forward to the base of the rock and I had a rather quick four-to-eight-feet drop, too quick to keep my feet against the rock face. I bounced around a little, and still not panicking, I spun slowly and my elbow slammed into the rock, scraping me up a little. I got the rest of the way down without incident once Bryan was anchored. My arm was bruised and a little bloody, but otherwise fine. Bryan and Adam each did another ascent, and then we packed up to head back to the cars.
We rendezvoused at Costco in Gilroy to gas up and grab dinner. On our drive home, Bryan popped in Focus on the Family's radio drama of "Anne of Green Gables." I was the only one who had heard this rendition before, but Bryan and I (and I think maybe Avery) had read the book and knew the story well, and we were cracking up through the brilliant delivery of lines, particularly those of Rachel Lynde and Anne.
We arrived back at Amy's around 9 p.m. and unloaded the cars. Amy cleaned up my wound, and then I headed home. I unpacked, got two loads of laundry done, finished my work on the inventory reports I had run Saturday morning, and went to bed. Hands down, one awesome weekend!
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