Has it really only been a dozen days since school let out for the summer? Were we at home, this would be the point that I would be signing up the kids for any summer camp possibility available, having been driven to such desperate acts by the non-stop bickering of three children forced to live in a house with a satellite dish, game systems galore, a white-trash soccer pitch carved out on a formerly fabulous lower deck and an inviting pool. As it is, we’ve taken our bickering bouts on the road, allowing relatives and other foreigners an up close view of our group dynamics.
We might not have the sun and heat of Novato, but we’ve got castles and Stonehenge and London all within driving distance or a Virgin train ride away. We’ve got pirate graveyards and castle ruins right next door to where we spend a few days with my husband’s sister on the Jurassic Coast. A tour of Old Trafford is the highlight for our littlest football-mad child.
Next up is a week in a sleepy village on the Irish Sea in Wales, so close to the sea itself that we have to be careful who plays goalie lest the football — soccer ball to you colonialists — goes over the stone hedge and down the cliff into the sea. I will fall asleep to the sound of waves crashing, promising myself that I will play the lottery for a chance to have enough money to afford my own house on the sea. We will watch sunsets beyond description from the deck, grateful that the family of my husband’s aunt had the foresight to snatch up the land decades and decades ago.
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It is all magnificent, of course. The only thing that would make it more so would be to have brought along a laundress. And perhaps to have planned for a sleep-away camp for a few days for the smallest of our fellow travelers.
I am sorry that we’re missing the Fourth of July parade and the Marin County Fair, two activities we do with gusto every year. Fear not, though, as we’re getting some fireworks to set off to celebrate our own Fourth. I find it as patriotic, of course, given that we’ll be celebrating the day on the Queen’s own soil.
