Remnants of Summer: Update on June 7, 2009

Rest is something that is incredibly easy to take advantage of in life. Whether it be working too much or being too social too often, rest is often overlooked in a lot of lives. This is especially true for life on this big hunk of steel I live on. Life here is incredibly busy and sleep is short. Of course, choices and preferences come into play on this subject, and I have always been a late night person, which makes it that much harder to get adequate amounts of sleep and rest.
With that said, thank God for break days! I had an opportunity this past week and a half to spend 5 of those days camping in a nearby campground. In the middle of Cardiff is a massive park, and just outside the park was my campground. There were only two of us that spent the time there after borrowing a tent from a local volunteer. My companion was Michael Ytreeide from Washington. The main focus of the break was rest, and we took that to heart. Aside from walking a ton (we didn’t have bikes or anything) we really didn’t do anything. We also were severely blessed when it came to the weather, and every single day was sunny and in the high 70’s to low 80’s. It was perfect.
There was also a side of adventure to our little outing. For the first time, we had a budget (that was much smaller than anticipated) that was really tight, and we had to make it work. So we used all of our pence to feed us and buy us drinks and we ate good, not healthy; just good. It also marked the first time both of us had grilled by ourselves, and it turned out pretty easy. The only problem was when we tried to grill chicken thighs without skinning them. They didn’t cook very well, and didn’t taste very good, but thank god for barbeque sauce! The rest of the meals consisted of a lot of bagels and lunch meat, which is a delicacy here. We also grilled hamburgers and salmon, which was delicious.
During our rest, we went to participate in what we had heard would be a “basketball tournament”. It was pretty funny that when we found out that we’d be using what was more like a hard beach ball instead of a real basketball. We were all split up into teams with ships people being divided up fairly evenly, and ended up having a lot of fun playing with internationals from all around. My team only won one of three, but we did bring down the undefeated team!
When I returned from break on Wednesday all I had to show for my break as a tan and stories of grilling. Apparently, people don’t like to rest on vacation, which I realized was how my vacations were as a kid sometimes. Now that I’ve grown a bit, I realize the awesomeness of sleeping a lot and just enjoying a day. Other than one museum visit (on accident) and multiple food and Wi-Fi runs, we barely left the park we were around. Thank God for rest.
The day after I got back was an Experience day, and I was luckily on tours. I still rather enjoying giving tours of our ship, and the time off in between them. I gave four tours that day which was highlighted by one to a group of ex-criminals. Although a few were somewhat trying and one was especially hard to understand, it was a blessing. My querulous attitude quickly changed on account of the humor of their personalities, which ranged anywhere from the odd, quirky with a bit of a twitch to the cool quiet guy, and even to the big, slow type that asks anything that pops into his head. In hindsight, they were quite the rag-tag group of kids, and they warmed up to my stolid sense of humor rather quickly, and accepted me. Although some of the traits of “misfits” like this can be pernicious at times and garner a measure of odium, I rather enjoy being around a group of people who have a sense of apathy to societies “norms”. They just don’t hide their faults as well as the rest of us.