Personal Narrative: My Family Journeys

1389 Words6 Pages

Before I was born, my grandpa on my dads side started a tradition of going on two family camping trips each year. It started with just my dads brothers and sisters and their children, but slowly some family friends were added, and then sadly my grandpa passed away. As my dads siblings got older they stopped coming as well, and soon it had become more of a tradition for my dad and his kids and some friends. Although the clientele on the trips has changed over the years, the trips have remained a highlight of my summer or fall each year. The trips always started the same. We would get up early on a Friday morning and spend what felt like hours loading the van and trailer with microwaves, bikes, and everything else on my moms mile long packing …show more content…

We started going to this campsite on rend lake after the one we used to go to stopped taking group reservations, and I am so glad we did because some of my favorite camping stories are here. For example, the first year we went me, my mom, and my sister Julia got lost on the way there and had to ask some hillbilly dudes standing in a yard full of car parts for directions. I was pretty sure we were going to die. Then, there was always the catching of the turtles. Every year at least one poor box turtle was found and me and some of the older nieces and nephews would decide it needed to be our pet, so we would build it a cage in between trees with sticks, make it water bowls, and give it lettuce. Somehow though the turtles always managed to escape our cages and we never understood how. Now that I am older and have seen the various head nods and winks from parents when the younger kids, who have kept up the turtle imprisonment tradition, check the cage, I think I have a pretty good idea why our pets always managed to “escape.” One trip in particular at Dale Miller I will always remember is the year we had relay races. We split up boys against girls, and all ages were forced to participate. The competition started by with my older sister Brenda and my brother Goat shotgunning a drink and then they could start their six hundred. Everyone else was exempt from the first part of …show more content…

When one of our camping places flooded probably 8 or so years ago we were forced to branch out and spend a weekend at Hickory shores. To say the least entertainment on our normal trips had nothing on Hickory shores. For once we were the normal ones at the campground. For starters, there was no lake access, so unless you were willing to swim through moss and trees, which only my dad was, we were forced to swim in a disgusting pool. To say that these 2 pools are the grossest things I have ever seen would be an understatement. The shallower of the 2 was considerably warmer, which is why it was called the pee pool by most of our campers, and you could actually see the murkiness of the water. To make matters worse, at one point we actually watched a women removing her weave while she was in the pool and placing it on the side of the pool with hairs falling in all over the place. The pools were just one of their great amenities though, they also had a small pond with a paddle boat that seemed nice, until the wind blew and you realised that it smelled terrible, earning it the nickname poo pond. Little did we know, though, that the pool and pond would be the least of our concerns. The weekend we stayed it was the fourth of July so people we shooting off fireworks. Well, late at night people staying on opposite sides of us apparently got into a little disagreement, and one side decided shooting fireworks off towards the

Open Document