I want to live in a po-mo treehouse.

This treehouse is awesome. My actual way of living is often at odds with my love of clean, modern, uncluttered design. Perhaps the clutter is more an apt representation of my own inner mind, while the uncluttered design if what I yearn to be. Who knows. Either way, it's an interesting dissonance.

Speaking of dissonance, that's the result of comparing my experience camping weekend before last at a lovely national forest camp ground to this weekend, where we experienced the hell known as KOA. Our initial plans, made much earlier this year, called for just the two of us camping in our truck overnight in a tent spot at Fort Stevens while we attended the kite festival in Long Beach, WA. When my mother in law wanted to visit around the same time, we thought it would be fun to just make a longer weekend of it and take her and our camper with us. With no availability at Fort Stevens, we thought we'd try another nearby campground.

All in all, the weekend WAS a success... and frankly in part due to all the joking about the redneck ghetto that the section of the KOA that we were in was. We accomplished our goals: spend time together, and see the kite festival. So one can't really complain too much.

But we are reminded that the term "camping" means a lot of things to a lot of people, and frankly few of them are appealing to us. :-) It's all a continuum, and we're just stuck somewhere along the middle. I don't care to trudge for miles with the bare necessities on my back, but I also don't see the point of hauling a RV the size of my house out into some bare spot of land just so you can sit inside and watch tv.

I want to take my little 16 ft camper somewhere that I can park in the dense forest, or beside a creek, and after walking a bit find the next campsite with some likewise low key folks who are disconnecting from the digital cloud, reconnecting with Mother Earth, and relaxing.

One very positive high note: I lost my phone on the beach! We'd driven onto the sand to hang out all afternoon, and at some point it hopped out of my pocket. We moved further up the beach to avoid the rising tide, and some point later realized I'd lost my phone. We all searched through every inch of vehicle, every bag, and every inch of sand we'd been near and I faced the fact: I'd lost my phone.

Then that evening, someone called Scot's phone, and said they'd found it! They are mailing it back to me.

Whew. Big karma points to that awesome guy that found it!