We have been on so many squad vacations together, in so many places and across so many continents, that today when our family parted from The Wan-Yau’s of San Francisco, Isa said, “They’re not friends, they’re our cousins!”
COVID-19 kept our families from coming together at all in 2020, and Sarah had worried that maybe the kids wouldn’t gel quite like they always have, especially now that our oldest ones are nearly nine years old. (Eva and Jonah have been close friends since they met in Seoul at age 2.) But nope, they were as thick as thieves within a half an hour of arriving at El Capitan Canyon, a bougie campground in Santa Barbara. It has its own spa. Need I say more?
Sarah has been hard-core into camping and fishing for who knows how long, and the family is from Northern California so they fit my stereotype of being more granola than we gas guzzling, single-plastic-using Southern Californians. We always count on her husband, Joe, to do all the grilling and he did not disappoint. The best part of the nonstop weekend of eating was Sarah’s insistence on having instant ramen while camping, so we tried three different kinds of instant ramen, either for nighttime snacks by the fire, or for breakfast, with our second-day fire-grilled ribeye.
Yeah this post is mostly reminiscing about eating.
Oh wait, I did play a lot of “GoodMinton.” The paddle says “The world’s easiest racquet game.” Verdict: Not that easy! Probably not the world’s easiest!
We did not spa but we did hike to the llama farm in the canyon, where almost everyone got to feed those furry beasts. We swam in the pool on the grounds, and made lots of fires, and the kids huddled around a single laptop for movie nights.
Eva spent the weekend contorting her body in weird shapes and trying to do a handstand without a wall. She and Jonah also did a lot of role playing and “scenes” that they directed as if they were filming movies. Jess taught Isa how to use the Rainbow Loom™ to make bracelets, and a bracelet young Jess made me will now be part of my TED conference fashion as I head to TED tonight, in Monterey. Luna, who was previously too small on the squad trips to be fully part of the kid clan, is now full on inserting herself and included in everything, especially finding sticks and other flammable items for the fire. Sarah could not stop telling us she brought four bowls of microwaveable Bibigo rice.
Due to my brief stint in the Girl Scouts and my general love of graham crackers, I took charge of the s’mores station each night and taught the kids how to wait for their marshmallows to achieve peak swollenness in order to yield optimal gooeyness when smashed down into the sweet sandwich. This was my greatest contribution. Otherwise, I just laid around a lot.
