Sequoia National Park, CA: May 2019 - Memorial Day in the Sequoias

One PTO day. That's all it cost.

Memorial Day weekend is three days. But the Friday before it is a dead day at work and everyone knows it. Take Thursday afternoon at minimum, burn Friday, and you have five days away for a day and a half of leave. I have done this math so many times it's automatic now. The calendar has these windows everywhere if you're willing to look for them. One strategic day of PTO before a long weekend resets you as completely as a week. Sometimes more, because you haven't had time to dread it.

My friends from undergrad had a campsite in Sequoia over Memorial Day and asked if I wanted to come. One of them had a son a year older than mine. That mattered more than I said at the time. Knowing someone else was doing it, that there was a toddler already in the mix, took something off the weight of the decision. I said yes.

I drove up from San Diego with another friend in the Jeep. Loading the trunk felt the way it always had. Cooler, tent, camp chairs, snacks stacked the right way. I let myself feel that. Some things are still the same. We stopped at In-N-Out on the way and my son devoured a full side of pickles while we ate, with the focused satisfaction of someone who has discovered something important. He also discovered the tile floor and the chairs. He was almost walking by this point and he knew it. He pushed those chairs across the floor on their legs and scooted himself forward and grinned the whole time. I have a video of his first real steps from this trip. He was ready.

We arrived at the Hume Lake campsite in a torrential downpour. No cell service. We sat in the Jeep and waited for everyone else to arrive from various parts of the state, which they eventually did, at which point we all looked at the campsite and agreed it was flooding. There was no setting up camp in that. We drove to the other side of the park and got lucky. A drop-in site near Grant Grove Village, dry enough, muddy but not underwater.

My friends set up camp while I wore him in the Ergo and helped where I could. These are serious campers and serious people. Easy ups went up, chairs came out, the fire got lit, and somewhere in there I sat down and breathed for what felt like the first time in months.

When it was time for bed I put him down in the Guava Family travel crib next to my air mattress in the tent. He screamed for twenty minutes. Nobody said anything. They all knew. This is how it goes, and it ends, and it did. He fell asleep in a borrowed fleece onesie in a tent in the mountains and I went back to the fire.

In the morning he had a blowout in the onesie. It was now our onesie.

That friend had been handing things down all year. Puffies, Keen sandals, anything sized for a kid who was growing through the outdoors fast. I had learned by then to take everything offered, say thank you, and pass it on when we were done with it. Kids grow out of gear in months. Quality gear matters out here, more than it does anywhere else, and the kindest thing the outdoor community does is keep it moving. Take the hand-me-downs.

The rain cleared overnight. Two of my friends cooked breakfast on a flat top grill in the morning. A real breakfast, hot food, more than enough of it. I sat in a camp chair and ate and felt something I can only describe as lucky. Lucky to be there. Lucky to have people who had just folded me in without making it a whole thing.

We hiked around Grant Grove. I had the backpack carrier, a couple others had a BOB stroller, and we moved at the pace of the kids, which was slow, which was right. At some point one of the guys took the backpack off my shoulders and carried him for a stretch. I let him. I was still getting my fitness back and I felt the altitude in a way I wouldn't have a couple years before, and accepting that without making it a thing was its own small victory. None of us covered anywhere close to the miles we were capable of before all this. We were standing in front of trees that are two thousand years old and that was enough. My son stared up at them. He climbed on every stump he could reach. The two-year-old, fully equipped in rain boots and a snowsuit, walked straight into the creek that had formed from all the rain and we all laughed in the way you laugh when you are tired and it is finally sunny and the worst thing that has happened is someone is wet and completely unbothered about it.

At some point I crawled into a friend's tent and took a two-hour nap on her air mattress, which was two feet off the ground and the coziest thing I had slept on in months. I nursed him and we both slept and woke up and slept again. Nowhere else to be. Nobody needing anything from me that I couldn't handle half-asleep in a sleeping bag in the mountains.

We packed up the last day. People just picked up my stuff and loaded it, which is the best thing anyone can do, and we drove back to our respective parts of California.

Eight hours home. One stop for gas and nursing. He slept mostly, and when he didn't I threw a toy into the backseat and kept the Jeep moving. This is something I figured out early: road trips happen. You don't wait for the perfect moment, you don't pull over every time someone fusses. You load the car and you go, and everyone adjusts, and you get there.

Camping looked almost exactly like it always had. A little more dirt, a little more adulting, the same fire, the same air, the same thing it has always done for me. I had been afraid it would feel like a diminished version of what it used to be. It didn't. It felt like itself, just with one more person in it.

Notes: Burn the Thursday before Memorial Day, not just the Friday. One and a half days of PTO becomes five days outside. Guava Family travel crib for tent camping. Backpack carrier over stroller on trail. Take every hand-me-down offered and pass it on when you're done. Quality gear matters in the outdoors more than anywhere else. Grant Grove Village drop-in sites are worth knowing about when your original site is underwater.