Day 1: Friday, July 13
Dori and I packed frantically after I got home from work, then left the house at 7 p.m. Two hours later, we left Temecula after a handful of last-minute errands. We jury-rigged my laptop to play DVDs and made it through Sweet Home Alabama and half of S.W.A.T. before arriving in Three Rivers at 1 a.m. Kenny and Paige are staying in Three Rivers, a small town about an hour southwest of Hume Lake, and that is where we slept.
Day 2: Saturday, July 14
The first half of this day was extremely trying, and I'm not just saying that to be dramatic. A hot, sweaty hike that I pegged at eight miles was followed by a steep descent through low-slung trees and poison oak to get to the river by which we would camp. As soon as we started into the ravine toward the water, all the muscles in my left leg and most in my right started cramping. It slowed everyone else down, and made it much harder to pick my way down the slope and through the poison oak. Psychologically and physically, this was an extremely difficult morning for me.
But the afternoon was better. We set up camp right by the North Fork of the Kaweah River, just inside Sequoia National Park. The effort it took to get there was rewarded by how remote our campsite was. We knew we wouldn't see any strangers, and we didn't, as there was really no trail leading to, from or past where we camped. We relaxed, ate dinner and dipped our feet in the river and then slept for about 12 hours Saturday night.
Day 3: Sunday, July 15
This was our day to kick it, and we did. After breakfast, we hiked a few minutes up an old mining road nearby to a shanty where ore pulled out of mines on the hillside was crushed for tungsten. We poked around for a bit and I took some pictures, then we proceeded up the road to a real, honest-to-goodness mine. There was even an ore cart sitting in the mouth of the mine shaft. Headlamps on, we explored the mine for about an hour, climbing into the vents that were blasted diagonally upward 80 years ago by miners. Outside, the temperature was in the 90's and it was bone-dry, but in the mine, it was cold and moist. I have never been a fan of dark, enclosed spaces, but this was fun. I would do it again in a heartbeat.
Later in the afternoon, we hiked upstream and chilled at a pool that was fairly deep. I got a sunburn, and we scoped out a suitable place to scale the steep hillside to get back to the road out.
Day 4: Monday, July 16
We woke up before dawn and began packing our things. Breaking camp is really not as bad as it sounds. But hiking out of a river gorge with no trail is not for the faint of heart. It took us about an hour to get from our campsite to the old road that led out of the hills to Kenny's truck--a distance of less than half a mile, over the river, up a steep hill and ultimately about 400 to 500 up in elevation. Then came the long walk. When we arrived in Three Rivers, I could barely move for all my sore spots and worn-out muscles. But we had a relaxing afternoon eating pizza and watching Comedy Central, then we topped it off with dinner at Bubba's, a barbecue place in Visalia.
The craziest few hours of our trip came on Monday. When we got back from our hike, we noticed that the right rear tire on my car was flat, so Kenny put the spare on and I went to a tire place in Visalia to get it fixed. It turned out the tire place was not the same company from which I had purchased my tires, as I thought, but after an hour of coaxing, they fixed it for free. So we were good to get home Monday night.
Or not. We had been cruising down Highway 99 for less than five minutes when I hit something in the road and my right front tire immediately went flat.
I don't think I can accurately convey what I was feeling as I put the spare on for the second time that day--the only day in the last year when we had 300 miles to travel to get home. The hassle of getting the first flat fixed was completely eclipsed by the bent wheel and destroyed tire that I had to deal with off the side of the highway.
We spent Monday night in a Motel 6 in Bakersfield, tired and defeated.
Day 5: Tuesday, July 17
We ate breakfast at Denny's while the tire place in Bakersfield fixed my tire and put it on my car. We left for Fallbrook around noon, and pulled in at 3 p.m., never so happy to be home.
Summary
I don't want to make it sound like the trip wasn't an adventure, or fun, or even that it wasn't relaxing. It was all of those things. We especially enjoyed spending time with Kenny and Paige.
However, I am convinced that God was determined to teach us some very important lessons using a few pages out of the old pain and suffering textbook. In exactly one week, we'll be on a plane to China, headed for an experience unlike any we've had, as individuals or as a couple. Maybe the stress of the hike and the two flat tires were a primer for summer camp in Beijing. Or maybe they were designed to make anything tough that happens there seem tame. Either way, here are some valuable lessons Dori and I learned this past weekend:
- Leaving the house does not equal departing on a road trip. It equals another set of to-dos that each whittle away at the true time of departure;
- Long pants are the new short pants when hiking through hills inhabited by poison oak;
- The tougher it is to reach a campsite, the more rewarding it will be to stay there, providing it is situated between a river of pure snowmelt and the entrance to an old tungsten mine;
- Bug spray is bliss--potentially cancerous in the long run, but instant bliss, all the same;
- Fixing one flat tire does not automatically exempt a vehicle or a motorist from hitting large objects in the highway, causing more flat tires.
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