I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends

We love ourselves a good vacation, and we try to camp as much as we reasonably can (no small feat given our summer of construction plus, of course Coronavirus!). 

A few weeks ago we headed out to Dinosaur National Monument for a camping + rafting adventure and learned some good lessons about community and interdependence. 

As you know, we faithfully camp in our 1987 Volkswagen Vanagon, Rainy. This is equal parts deeply cool and notoriously unreliable. We always say that we feel bad for folks who load up into a car just assuming they’ll end up where they intended to go when they intended to get there. The Morningstars live under no such delusions, and we’ve both enjoyed and endured many unexpected adventures as a result. 

Our first two days at Dinosaur were hot and uneventful (as camping trips should be!). We drove the back roads, we waded in the Green River, we took some short hikes and checked out the petroglyphs and, of course, the fossils for which the park is well-named.

Day three was our rafting day, and we had a blast on the Green River. It was one of our best family memories in a long time - light and fun and out in nature and adventurous and just perfect.

And then we got back to the rafting company's parking lot, and Steve started Rainy and then Rainy stopped. We were about 10 miles from the campground, and while Steve spent hours working on the van before ultimately surrendering to the help of a tow truck and 3-hour tow truck ride, the kids and I hitched a ride back to the campground with new friends (that is, strangers who were also headed to the campground and had spare seats in their vehicle). The lovely rafting folks gave him a ride into town for some auto supplies. My parents offered to drive out to help us out. Our camping neighbors loaned us a broom so we could sweep up before packing up. We were surrounded by the help of those around us.

And the next morning, Steve drove a different car the three hours back to pick us up and we headed home. And you know what? Our auto insurance even picked up the $800 tow truck bill!

Without a community of people around us willing to help, our camping trip would have ended with  us being stuck and hot and hungry and unhappy. But because of the kindness of both strangers and family, what could have been a disaster ended up being a family adventure and a fun night of junk food and sleeping out under the stars. And I am simply grateful.