This past week, we spent some time up in the Adirondacks away from the farm! It was glorious and we have lots of stories to share about this later. But as we were prepping for the trip, we couldn’t help but think back on the first vacation we ever took together, back when we were just 22 years old and fresh out of college.
Back then, we were a year into our relationship and our lives were starting to head in different directions. Greg had just been awarded a research fellowship called the Watson and was headed to Africa for a whole YEAR to study how farmers were adapting to environmental change.
Time together was in very short supply, so we planned a camping trip up to the Adirondacks together. We had just 2 days off from our summer jobs and a month to spare before Greg left for the year, and we were hell-bent on making them count.
So, I picked up Greg in the car my Dad let me borrow for the weekend and we strapped a big red canoe on top. We were about two hours into the drive north, holding hands and smiling ear to ear, when the front of the car started smoking and the steering locked up. I pulled over and got that sinking feeling.
The car was towed to a shop and being a Saturday afternoon and all, the mechanics weren’t thrilled to see us. They begrudgingly checked things out and gave us the news. It was going to be an expensive repair and the worse part was that it was going to take a while to fix.
You can imagine our disappointment. Sitting at the mechanic’s playing cards on a picnic bench next to a busy 4 lane road was not our idea of the perfect getaway. But soon, we’d be living on different continents without any reliable way of even talking to each other so we tried to make the most of it.
We stayed hopeful and joked and laughed. And as the sun started to go down, they broke the news to us. The car wasn’t going to be able to fixed until morning which meant that we needed to find a place to stay. Since we couldn’t afford a hotel, we asked if we could pop up our tent behind the shop. The mechanics didn’t seem to mind our rather strange request.
But, with a little more thought, this didn’t sound like a great plan so we started to look elsewhere. Eventually we found ourselves in a little public park with lots of NO CAMPING ALLOWED signs posted everywhere. It wasn’t the Adirondacks, by any stretch of the imagination, but it was better than the spot behind the mechanic’s and it would do.
So, hidden behind some pine trees and adjacent to a pile of old left-footed shoes some person probably stashed away for a rainy day, we set up our tent, took the picture you can see above and drifted off to sleep.
The next next morning, we had one mission which was to get up to a little lake in the Adirondacks and go camping together. And after we got our car back, we did just that.
Your Farmers,
Jenney and Greg