Ahh, the taste of freedom!!!

You know that feeling when you have plans?  Set plans?  The feeling is a suppressing, constraining weight that says that you are held in by the boundaries of whatever those ‘plans’ entail?

We HAD plans.  Plans to be camp hosts this summer.  We just found out that we won’t be hosting.  The couple that was in this particular campground last summer, who ‘for sure’ weren’t coming back due to health reasons, are back (previous hosts always get first dibs).   That, plus the fact that I didn’t get our multi-page application paperwork (both physical and online), background checks, fingerprinting, and (apparently) quality communication with the supervisor, done while we were on the road this winter (I don’t do stuff like that On The Road!!!), means that we aren’t going to be camp hosts this summer.  Apparently there was a due date for signing our lives away, and I missed it! LOL!!!

I hadn’t known that hosting was such a hovering burden; I realized it when I didn’t feel bad at all.Not.for.One.second, when I found out that the site had been taken by the previous hosts.
Then I worried that the kids would miss being hosts, but when I asked Beth about it, all she had to say was, “Well, maybe it’s for the best, can I go make some tea?”…  a few  remarks from other parts of the tribe were, “(excited smile) Maybe we’ll get to do something fun this summer now!”, “I heard. So?”, and “Good!  Now we won’t have to come home from work to do the ranger’s work too”.

I don’t know what I was worried about.  I think that we enjoyed hosting last summer because it was new.  But doing the ranger’s job all summer, and babysitting the park because certain employees are syphoning fuel and supplies (and maybe $4k worth of camping fees) apparently got old for the whole tribe, but we didn’t notice.  We won’t miss being lied to about the ranger’s ‘wife’ when it turns out she isn’t really his wife (his wife is at home 90 miles away with the kids!), or 1am appointments with loud drunks that don’t care that other people in the park are trying to sleep.  We will not be upset that we don’t get to babysit the park all day, every day, and be woken up at 7 in the morning by someone that wants to know if we have any sites open, or can we save them a site until they bring their camper out.   So, while we won’t have the full hookups that a host site provides for our tribe, our time will be our own once again.  And we are all so excited!!!
Well, in reality, Vaughn isn’t quite as excited as the rest of us; he doesn’t care much for the moving every two weeks thing that comes with staying in public campgrounds.  He won’t miss the camp hosting duties At All, but he will miss the full hookup site!  🙂
The only thing that we might have missed about hosting, was meeting all of the campers!  But, then again, we will STILL be meeting them – we’ll just be camped next to them! LOL!

So, due to the overwhelming lack of disappointment over not hosting again this summer, and due to the overwhelming lack of support for finding a different camp hosting gig, we won’t be applying with the other 2 agencies that have summer hosting jobs around here.  We will be camping, we will be playing, we will be exploring once again.  And that is so much more our speed than being confined by a schedule and a single camping site.   Gee, we might really get up to Glacier this summer with the RV, we may now have time to spend a few weeks at our fav Park Lake (which we neglected last summer for the first time in 9 years), and we WILL have the time and the freedom for day-long road trips (we still don’t have our Jr. Ranger badges from Big Hole National Battlefield).  We will get to camp in our old haunts, including staying at a campground where some of our adoptive camping grandparents host!

You know that saying, When God closes a door, he opens a window?  Well I think this time, God closed the bathroom window and opened up the French doors!  😀
The more we realize how much of our lives have been given back to us, the more giddy we get about being back home and having the chance to again experience why we love Montana so much!    <3