This past fall, I was absolutely determined to finally get my kids up to see the foliage where I grew up.
This is such a remarkable experience that I wanted to be sure that they saw it this year.
It won’t be long before they are gone and this has been one of those weird things I’ve always wanted to do together as a family. I grew up outside of the central air conditioning as much as I possibly could. Any opportunity I had to go camping or get out in nature, I took it. So it’s really sort of disheartening that my immediate family has very little desire to go camping at all. Every time I bring up even a weekend camping trip, I get groans all around. Nobody wants to leave the air conditioning or the wi-fi or the television to go out and enjoy what nature has to offer. But I started early in the summer when it came to this leaf watching trip. And the more I talked about it, the more I realized this was something I was willing to negotiate over. And I knew it would come to that with these homebound people. So the trip with my family actually did happen and it was a wonderful week. But we stayed in campgrounds where there were toilets and showers and electricity. So I also agreed to bring along some space heaters as my family was so worried that it would be cold at night. It was definitely worth the compromise even when it came to the space heaters because we had such a wonderful time. And the leaves were just perfect this past fall.