Bear Creek children put together houses for endangered bats.

Tower Peak oversees every ride at Leavitt Meadows.

When I was a child, I used to love the end of a school year. There were no lectures anymore, many field trips were planned for that time, we were returning our textbooks and being issued new ones, everything easy going. As a parent, I honestly cannot stand the end of the school year. Instead of easing up, happenings pile up — volunteering for Gold Rush Day, donating for this or that cause, not forgetting to bring strawberries or a pack of cookies to the school. Having opted for crackers as apparently undemanding, dry and durable food, a notice shows up at the last moment that they absolutely must be nut free due to allergies. Subsequently I spend a whole morning rushing through five stores, just to discover that it is quite impossible to purchase such cookies, for they all sport at least a warning that they had been made on equipment possibly coming in touch with nuts. And a real treat is, when in both grades that my two children attend, a decision is made to organize events and trips on the same day, and both teachers desperately ask me to help, and I end up driving up and down — and still not keeping up.

At the same time we were organizing a presentation for the children at the stables, about bats, along with building bat-houses. I was a bit worried, especially regarding the use of power drills and screw-drivers, which of course attracted mostly the older boys, as such tools come in shapes similar to hand-guns. Eventually even Lisa tried it with a power drill, and I can proudly declare that no-one ended up drilled or nailed to the bat-house, and thus the same could be distributed on trees around the preserve, for the benefit of local, endangered bats.

Girls return from their spontaneous ride among the wildflowers..

It takes several hours just walking around Saddlebag Lake in Yosemite.

Then the day when school ended had finally arrived, kids brought home great report cards, and we could collectively exhale. Which we promptly did, in the form of a trip to the Sierra, just a quick one for one night. Lisa and I had squeezed in one horse-back ride at Leavitt Meadows. An one-hour loop around the meadow — thousands of wild irises blossomed all around us, the meadow was completely blue, which was something different and surprising again.

On the next day we ventured to Yosemite National Park, specifically to Saddlebag Lake. I had been there a few years earlier with other women, and Sid longed to see this beautiful piece of landscape as well. Saddlebag Lake is a reservoir, but the other lakes and ponds in the Twenty Lake Basin are natural ones. Found at ten thousand feet elevation, the area is accessible only for a short part of the year, although after recent skimpy winter there was not much snow left even this high.

Three huffing figures on the back-drop of three mountain lakes.

Children protest our brutality, forcing them to move in the wilderness.

Our hike started by stopping at a local café, where we obtained boat tickets for our return trip. To reach Twenty Lake Basin, one must walk around Saddlebag, which represents some two miles along a relatively uneventful trail; this way we could skip having to walk back. Our prepubescents were rumbling, and Hippo and I were huffing, but otherwise we enjoyed our trip to the lakes a lot. One iffy moment ensued when we chose to descent to a beautiful little green meadow on the shore of Greenstone Lake. It is protected by rocky outcrops from the wind, and we found ourselves within a few seconds swarmed by millions of mosquitoes. No bug sprays would work against such concentration of insects, for there's always a mosquito desperate enough to ignore the smell. We sprinted to the windy ridge so fast, I consider it at this elevation a top athletic performance.

We made it in time back to catch the boat, even worked out a kink in the boat-taxi business. The woman who sold us our tickets at the lodge had accepted our money, yet failed to hand our reservation to the crew, which in turn did not expect our presence. It would seem that confused tourists randomly forget or mix-up boat departure schedule anyway, and thus it all went well in the end.

The devastated youths seek a rest, whilst ignoring the surrounding landscape.

Flowers blossom on meadows of Twenty Lakes Basin; North peak in background.

After this hike we stopped at the hot springs to bathe, and Lisa lost her favorite sweat shirt in the river. Wind had probably blown her towel and the shirt off of a boulder, and Murphy's Law worked as expected: we had found the old threadbare towel, but not the clothes. Well, nothing could be done, so we packed and headed back home, with a dinner break at Strawberry Inn. We had expected to be late, and we told ourselves that it did not matter as the kids did not have to get up for school next morning anyway.

Our bus started to emanate strange, slapping noises, right after Jamestown. Sid quickly exited to the shoulder. We did not need to search at length for the problem; driver-side front wheel was flat. We tried to re-pressurize it with our compressor, but the tire kept on hissing angrily — it was not hard to find a huge hole after some bolt or similar large object. At this moment, darkness descended rapidly; we found ourselves on the shoulder of a major highway, working to change two tires. It was obvious that no-one would help us fixing a puncture like this at nine o'clock in the evening, and thus we decided to finish the remaining hundred and twenty miles on our emergency spare. It is a narrow, smaller wheel, so it went to the rear, and a full, healthy tire went to the driven front. I was most afraid of the other cars rushing closely by, but we eventually finished up — and spent almost four subsequent hours crawling along at under fifty miles per hour, taking side roads wherever possible. We dared to re-enter a freeway only for the last leg of our journey, when it was after midnight and traffic had eased up, making us hope that the other drivers would cope with our slow motion.

From the water taxicab across Saddlebag Lake, you can see (left to right): North Peak and Shepherds Crest.

Our new goat — Licorice.

We had successfully made it back home by one thirty a.m. — and on the following day we visited Costco, making them fix the tire. Hippo went to work and I went with our kids to see goats and ponies. Also, it finally came to opening our swimming pool. Hot days alternate with cold ones this year, and when the water finally warms up, the air gets cold, and vice versa.

Our stable life got a new impulse, when it turned out that another small goat lost her originally planned home. Lisa kept begging and promising, until we bought the black Licorice, beloved by all children. Sid claims that such an act turned us into kulaks. For me, it means that I must now intensify my efforts to put together our goat club, for we cannot afford the maintenance of two goats on our own. It's not just about finances; there's care — letting them out of their pen, closing them back up, running them around, feeding them, trimming their hooves — and within a year, we get to worry about husbandry, baby goats, and milking. A club, where multiple families take turns once or twice weekly, similar to the pony arrangement, is a much more merciful solution. We shall see how long is Lisa going to last regarding her promises of care for goats.