They’re Arrived!
Every year my family makes a pilgrimage to North Idaho.
How far north?
We might as well be in Canada it is that far north.
A 12-hour road trip each way doesn’t phase my kids. They look forward to this week each year. For months leading up to our trip, they can hardly contain their excitement. My wife says it rivals Christmas. I would say it surpasses Christmas. A week of camping in our cabin on a piece of property my in-laws owned, loving named Bert’s Last Resort. A week of hiking, swimming, fishing, picking berries, cousins, friends, staying up way past bedtime, riding bikes to the general store, smashing pennies on the railroad tracks, launching paper rockets, are just a some of the things we have done over the years.
Every year leading up to our trip my kids always ask the same questions. Can you blame them? They want to make sure they can get in as much fun as they can while we are there.
“Are we taking our bikes again this year?”
“Is big bestie going to be there? What about little bestie?”
“Are we going huckleberry picking?”
“Can we have a bake sale so we have spending money at the general store?”
“Are we sleeping in our own tent or in a cabin with you and mom?”
“Is the sandbox going to be ready?”
It goes on for months. As soon as Christmas and New Years are over it’s Idaho speculation time.
Something else has happened, in the last few years we have been in Idaho, the general store runs out of ice cream before the end of the week and can’t make huckleberry milkshakes.
I’m sure the Naples General Store has an idea of the typical amount of ice cream the go through on a week by week basis during the summer but they forget to account for the 60+ people that flock to Bert’s Last Resort and demand another 10+ milkshakes a day from the general store.
This year in preparation I made a phone call.
“Naples General Store, how can I help you?”
“Hi, I’m calling because we’ll be having a family reunion in a few weeks and I wanted to make sure you knew so that additional ice cream can be ordered. The last few years you’ve run out and by the end of the week we aren’t able to get huckleberry milkshakes.”
“Uh…okay, let me write down those dates on the calendar.”
After I hung up with the person on the phone I really didn’t think I was being serious.
We were not the first ones to arrive at Bert’s Last Resort nor were we the first ones to go to the general store.
But when the first milkshake run happened, our mob was greeted by the employees of the general store with a salutation that let me know they took my warning phone call to heart.
“They’ve arrived!”
I would love to know how many milkshakes we end up purchasing that week. I had at least 5.
Even with the phone call they still ran out of Moosetracks ice cream.
I guess they underestimated how much we like ice cream.