When All Else Fails, Head to the Great Southern Buffet

All summer, David has been wanting to get our camping gear down from the attic, organize it all, and then for the four of us to go to one of our favorite mountain sites in NC for an overnight camping trip. He hadn't ever even been camping before he met me; but now, some of our favorite memories are from camping trips taken in NC, VA, and CO, both at music festivals, and with the unlikely--but intimate and sorely missed--core group that included my mom, David, me, Kate, Western Otto, sometimes Walter, and give or take a tag-along here and there.

We picked this past Saturday to drive up to Boone/Blowing Rock and camp at the Julian Price Park campground. Due to the knotted-stomach-inducing week I just had trying to get everything done, when Friday evening rolled around, camping--with my kids--was looking less and less appealing. We'd already committed to driving up to the High Country so Daniel and Sheila and my dad could give Grace her b-day gifts from them, and so we could give Sheila and my dad their b-day gifts from us. When I began checking online for available hotel rooms in Boone and the only two options I could find included terrible ratings that were entitled "Room for Hell" and "Meth Alley" (for $98 a night, no less), camping was looking better and better by the minute. But the kids had "hotel" and "free breakfast" lodged in their minds and refused to get excited for camping. I decided that I did NOT want to go camping with kids who did NOT want to go.

The fact that I am compelled to search for available hotel rooms when three of my family members live in Boone--in different residences--both makes no sense to me and at once perfect sense--but even I had to draw the line, impose boundaries, and establish Plan B.

Plan B was for us to meet in Wilkesboro at the biggest kid-friendly buffet we knew about, a place that used to be called Ryan's and is now called Fire Mountain. David's and my astonishment at the amount of food available for consumption was topped only by our astonishment at the waistlines of the collective consumers. David was the skinniest guy in there. People were there to chow.

Our table stuck out--not only because four or the five adults in our party were the slimmest ones in the rooms--but because we paraded in with bags of birthday gifts, and leading the march were Grace and Johnny, dressed like Cinderella, and Superman, respectively. We became a spectacle, but one from which we could all walk away when the evening was done, back to our communities, where, who knows we might have actually been embarrassed at the attention we called. Because, I don't know--is it me? Or do you have family members that redefines all-you-can-eat buffets to all-you-can-eat-in-one-sitting AND-can-wrap-up-in-a-napkin-to-stuff-in-your-pockets-to-take home?

When Daniel asked me for a hint for what to buy Grace for her birthday, I asked her if there had been something she'd really wanted but hadn't gotten for her birthday. She said, "Yes, a Chou Chou doll." I passed along the hint, and when Grace opened a Baby Chou Chou Make Me Better Doll, she beamed from the inside out and said, "It worked, Mommy!" It was a moment that I'd like to bottle up and release and re-live when we need to be reminded of how non-corrupted and grateful and sweet Grace really was on September 1, 2007. I realize, though, that I can't have the have the impossibly sweet Grace memory without the vision of the pocket pork-chop. It's ok--I'll take em both.