More Priceless Than A Mastercard Moment
Eat your heart out, Mastercard, I found something TRULY “PRICELESS” !
I’ve been wanting to write this for several months. Now’s the time.
You’ve seen the old Mastercard adverts thousands of times I’m sure. It all boils down to how doing something that’s absolutely incredible, something you’ll remember for the rest of your live, something of true value to you and your family…is better done with a Mastercard.
Well, I’ve got something A LOT better and something that is truly “priceless”.
Each summer for the last four years I’ve been taking my daughter to a summer camp in the lower Shenandoah for a week of “family camp.” It’s an organized summer camp. The kind that has hundreds of wild screaming kids riding horses, swimming, canoeing, going on nature hikes, doing crafts, and all the rest of the things that kids do at summer camps. It’s away from the city noises and traffic. In fact, unless you know the one secret place on the high ridge, you can forget getting even a cell signal there. Yup, the Verizon bimbo and his mob of motley’s hasn’t found this place either. And I hope they’re not in a rush.
One week out of the summer camp schedule is carved out for “family camp”. It’s a week where whole families can escape from where ever they are and whatever they’re doing and come to a nice quiet solace, with birds, trees, a nice lake, evening campfire, camp songs and lots of good fun.
Usually my daughter does kid stuff during the day and I do daddy stuff. We sometimes overlap in our schedules and we meet for meals and the evening camp fire. But it gives her a chance to spread her wings in a protected environment and also gives me time to enjoy some of the things I like to do, like bug collecting. People know me more during this camp as “the bug man” than by my real name. And, that’s cool.
But this year we had the chance to take a day trip canoeing down the James River. Now it’s been a while since I’ve done long canoeing but the idea of a nice calm day floating down the river with my kid and a bunch of others, dodging the mosquitoes and other bugs, sounded like a good idea. So we signed up.
The day started early with an hour long bus ride to the drop off point. From there, we grabbed our lunches, life vests, paddles and canoes and set sail. The river was incredible. We glided through clouds of damselflies that would fly up and cover you like sawdust in a saw mill. And they showed no fear. There were butterflies of all sorts. Birds of all sorts. A beaver even swimming aimlessly amongst us while we were jumping from a rope vine like if we were all part of the picture. Some of the local human life was interesting as well: we passed a man doing his morning tai chi mantra’s, standing in the middle of the river; people sitting in lawn chairs up to their necks in the river, with their dog and a cooler, well stocked with cold cans. There were the usual local folks fishing for something to fry up for the evening as well. It was one big calm peaceful family on the James as we floated down. And for the day, all was at peace with the world.
We also learned some harsh lessons about how to recover a canoe from capsizing. Don’t think for a minute that the James is a slow winding sea of tranquility from Nelson county to the Bay. It’s not. It’s got some serious low spots and some rapids areas that gave us some really quick lessons in remedial canoe capsize recovery and rapids canoeing. A few stressful times to balance out the tranquil ones. But all part of the day’s fun.
Seven or so hours after our start we finally found the ending landing of our journey. We were wet, tired and sunburned. But we’d also found part of ourselves inside that we hadn’t touched in a long time. We also found a new relationship between a father and daughter that can only come from such a trip as this.
This week and this trip were truly priceless. For everything else, well, I guess there’s American Express…
I’m Don Rima and that’s the way I saw it, from where I stand…
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I’m assuming you are referring to Nelson County, VA. It is a beautiful area of Virginia. It’s fun to tube parts of the James River as well.