Seattle Campground Take One

For those of you who don’t know, this trip was planned in part for me to spend some time with my birth father and his family. I had spoken to him a few times before we left, because he was concerned about where we were going to stay. He had originally wanted to put us up in a hotel, but I had said that wasn’t necessary—we were going to have the T@B after all—but when I spoke to my aunt, she insisted that we stay at her daughter’s new house, because they had plenty of room and they wouldn’t hear of us staying at a campground when we had family in the area.

I was glad we were going to arrive in Seattle a day early. I wanted time to do laundry, relax and repack our things before arriving at Katti’s house. I was nervous. I had only met this cousin once before over a year ago, when her sister Marjan had asked me to come down to the city for lunch. We were ragged and tired and I wanted to be fresh and clean when we showed up.

It was late when we got to the campground, sometime after 9 PM and right away I felt disappointed. It seemed more like a parking lot than a campground. The site they sent us to was too narrow for our tent, because the RV next to us had its sewer line hooked up in the only clear spot where we could have put it.

I went back to the office and asked them to move us and the woman I spoke to was unsympathetic. She said, “You have a trailer and a tent?” as if that was an offense. All the way across the country we stayed at KOAs and had no problems. “All of our sites are 16 feet, what do you want me to do?” I was tired and beginning to feel desperate and asked if there were any other campgrounds in the area. Then the young man who also worked there and who had checked us in when we arrived stepped in to help. He offered to put us in a wider site, even though it was deluxe (having cable access, not that we could use it with no TV) and said he would do it for the same price. We were staying there for 9 nights. I was glad for his help and yet when he showed us the site, right up front and two rows from the highway, where we were staring at a street light and listening to trucks roar by, I cried. It was after he left, and in the dark, but the kids saw me and comforted me. I don’t know if it was from exhaustion or nerves, I don’t know. I just cried and together we set up the tent and then I climbed in with them and we cuddled like we used to when they were little. It seemed like too long since we did that and in fact it precipitated a number of conversations on their part of-- remember when…we used to play spoons in the drawer or when you spent more time in Conor’s room then mine?