The Best Day Ever - JT's Tales from the Trail

Jill Thomas is a rambler, traveler, and storyteller with a big laugh who believes life takes her where she needs to go, no matter the roundabout path.

The first real fight Stormy and I ever had was when I packed everything in our campground into our truck while he was out riding bikes with our kids. When they returned, I said, "Load your bikes on the rack; we are leaving now, and we're never going car camping again." My family did as told in stunned silence. Stormy didn't talk to me unless necessary for two days.

Our family disliked car camping for different reasons, but we thought it was our duty as parents to give our kids this experience, so we endured. For me, car camping was equally as tedious as it was exhausting. Who wants to spend their day blowing up floaties, feeding kids, dealing with meltdowns, and washing dishes in a tepid plastic tub of food-speckled water on a picnic table?

We were packed into a gravel campsite in Campbell River on Vancouver Island like spoons in a drawer, with no place to privately change our clothes in a standing-up position. The campgrounds surrounding us sparked my insecurity with their perfect trailer set ups, with checkered tablecloths on picnic tables, and covered outdoor kitchens. How do those women do it?

It rained every day on that trip and nobody was having fun. We lived in Salt Spring Island at the time so being in nature wasn't a novelty. And I decided I was done camping until the kids were big enough to carry their gear into the backcountry.

The city was a novelty, so the following year we took our family vacation in Vancouver. It was magical in so many fun ways. Our kids were 10 and 8 and had never ridden a bus or an escalator. Their minds were blown.

Jacob said on the first day, "This must be what Paris feels like. How long until I can live here?" Hana gave all of her spending money to the first homeless person she saw and immediately determined that cities were not her jam.

On the last day, we decided to take the kids to the PNE, Vancouver's annual fair. They were not intrigued when we told them,"It's like the Salt Spring Fall Fair, just bigger." We only convinced them to go by promising a bus ride. They were sulky and obstinate. We forced them to slog through the exhibits and endured their exasperation.

The PNE is one of my best childhood memories. Every year, in the fall, we would wake up one morning, and my mom would say, "today is the day." It was the best surprise we always knew was coming. The rule in my growing-up family about the PNE was no rides until after dark, and I was sticking to it with my kids despite the interminable sulking. It was a family tradition, after all.

Finally, we went to Playland and rode the rides for six-plus hours, missing very few of them. It was bliss. I freaking love rides and realized my fearless kids and I had this in common. 

We ended the night walking through the fair to the exit at 1 am, the kids clutching greasy bags of mini donuts and cotton candy. Hana looks at me with an, earnest face and says,"It's so sad that such a beautiful thing has to end." A week later, during the first week of school, Jacob wrote an essay about how going to the PNE was the best day of his life.

That was the last time I was at a fair until last weekend when we went to the Pensacola Interstate Fair. This 135-year-old fair pulls people from all over southern Alabama and northern Florida. Despite being thousands of miles away, the fair was just like I remembered - the colors, smells, old-school games, and rides. Don't get me started on the hobby exhibit, which was the second-best thing we saw after the poultry barn.

Fun House, Haunted House, and Tilt-a-Whirl are the same despite the passing of a generation and change of country that has happened since the last time I was at a fair. Impressive considering that the world feels like an entirely different place.

We rambled until our feet were too tired to continue. I ate my first corn dog. It was bliss. We left there early cause we are kind of old, and I didn't ride any rides cause my companions were not up for that.

Nonetheless, when we left the fairgrounds, I thought,"It's so sad that such a beautiful day has to end."

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