Ottawa Beach
Yesterday, we took a quick bike trip across town to one of the Little Free Libraries — Ess on a tag-along bike, only one wheel to it and a rigid attachment to my seat post. The season of drought has partially lifted and the green leaves in the gentle late summer sun and the blue sky… I don’t think there’s room to improve on the lovely weather we had. We looked for bunnies and sang out when we saw them, Ess got harassed by a barking dog at a stoplight, we huffed and puffed up hills… the usual bike stuff.
So Ess made her selection and we pedaled for home, I thought — when I turned around, she had eschewed pedaling entirely, pulled her new book out from her bike pouch, and was just reading, with the book resting on her handlebars.
There’s a lot to say about our trip to Omaha. The short version is: we hadn’t traveled in a while so we thought we’d give a short road trip a try to figure out how it would all work. The slightly longer version is: we never had so many unwelcome surprises in one trip, from having to bail on a hotel because it was so unclean, to me coming back to the car to find Ess and Mykala crying because nothing was going right, to the entire city of Omaha being rather a bit different than how it looked in the online research, to moving to a different hotel each day. In the end, it all held together, and we had what mattered most: a nice time together. They say traumatic experiences build teams, and so I think the same is true of times like this… bad vacations make families stronger.
Ess will always remember the hotel with dog pee in the corner, the one we ran away from as fast as we could.
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