Senior Moment(s)

     My son Greg turns 40 tomorrow. I turn 70 next year. Maybe that's the reason my son meticulously planned a grandfather, son, grandsons camping trip to visit national parks and monuments out west this past month. For my grandsons Grant, 11; Luke, 9; and Owen, 5, it would prove to be a test of their courage and endurance. As my grandson Grant said as we neared the end of our journey, “I never knew two weeks could last so long.”

    It didn't help that when we started out in the Badlands of South Dakota, we were pummeled by 50 mph winds from waves of thunderstorms. It wrecked our neighbor's tent (see picture) But that didn't chase us from our own five-man tent, though when the heavens opened up with a deluge of rain, it did. We retreated to our mini-van to spend the rest of the night there.

    And while we were in the Badlands, we were notified that our next camping destination, Yellowstone National Park, had been closed by flooding. But we moved on and persevered.

    We needed some humor to spice up our adventures. I inadvertently supplied one such comic moment when I emerged from a rest area restroom somewhere along I-15 in Utah. I saw a car with its lights on and just assumed it was Greg, already starting our mini-van and eager to continue on down the expressway.

    I hustled to the front passenger door and opened it, surprising a middle-age woman who sat at the driver's seat. “Oh,” she exclaimed, startled by my near intrusion. “Wrong car,” I said simply and shut the door.

    Finding the right car, I had hoped that my mistake had gone unnoticed. No such luck. I saw Greg bent over the steering wheel unable to contain himself from a fit of laughter. The grandboys were more serious, perhaps worried about the mental health of grandpa.

    In fact, the next day we were coming back to our car after taking a fairly long hike to a scenic overlook. At the parking lot, I meandered away from the rest of my family to check license plates, since we were playing that game of trying to spot every state's license plate while on the road.

    When I did get back to our car, my grandson Luke asked, “Grandpa, did you get into the wrong car again?”

    “No,” I replied.

    “Did you think about it?”

    “No!” And if I would have been thinking the day before, instead of putting my brain on auto-pilot, I would not have gotten into the wrong car then either.

    I did chide Greg over his own memory lapses this trip. He forgot the boys' swimsuits once, leaving them at a hotel. He also left his expensive jacket in a jeep after we took an off-road ride. Then we stopped at a campstore for supplies and on the way out of the parking lot, we spotted a couple standing outside their van, waving and pointing frantically towards us.

    Greg felt they must have been trying to flag down another car, not our's. That is until we rounded the first curve on the main road and heard a 'thud.' In his rearview mirror, Greg saw that a beer that he had placed on top of our mini-van had rolled off into the ditch. He had placed it on top of the car while getting the boys inside, then forgot about it.

    I wanted to say, “Like father, like son? Think about it.”