Next week it's back to school for me, so we decided to escape the heat and camp up in the Tushar's above Beaver. I hate the getting ready, but I'm always glad afterwards. We had wonderful food because of Paul as always - his BBQ chicken stew with garlic cheese biscuits and for our first time, Woofem's (or whop, whops as the Brook's call them) for dessert. Then we had leftover biscuits and hashbrown omelets, and applesauce for breakfast with hot chocolate to warm with while we waited for it to cook. All very yummy! We took a nice evening walk to look for elk, but a 4-wheeler passed us and probably scared anything we might have seen away. Also, I was crabby about 2 trailers parked for indefinite periods of time in a couple of favorite camp spots. And when we checked another one there was a tent and camp chairs there. On the way back from our walk when it was getting late to be coming back to camp Paul walked over to check to see if anyone was really camped there and found the tent was empty...just an old one and old chairs left there as a camp place holder by some other selfish person. I so wanted to take the tent and chairs and put them in the woods where no one could see them and I also wanted to write on the trailers with a permanent marker expressing my thoughts on leaving trailers parked on public lands for long periods of unused time!!! I probably would have except that Paul and Bean just ignored my rants. But, we did find a new, pretty nice spot and did fine there.
After putting away camp in the morning, we drove over the mountains via Big John's Flat and then down to Mary'sville and up to Miner's Park. We looked around there and then Paul and I hiked up to see Bullion Falls. It's kind of steep, hot hike with just a far away view of the falls unfortunately. (We tried a different trail to see it that became dangerous and impassible first.) After lunch as we were driving back down to Mary'sville we came around a corner to see a mother bear and two cubs in the road. Looked like they had come down to get a drink from the stream at the side of the road. Paul was able to get a few pretty good pictures through the windshield. Crazy. First time seeing bears like that. They hightailed it up the hillside into the brush very quickly as we inched closer to get a better picture. It was a steep hillside, but that didn't slow them down a bit. We've seen people bear hunting up in that area before. Now we know there really are bears up there. We didn't see any goats as we came over the pass from Big John's unfortunately. We had a nice back roads drive home and then used a birthday gift card for some yummy dinner. Great last fling before getting back to the grind.
Unfortunately, with all of the Covid-19 restrictions we are going to have to deal with at school and after last year's pretty awfulness with the new administrations demands for constant testing and interventions, the teacher's crabbiness/stress because of that, feeling caught in the middle of the interventionist and the teacher, and the stupid things they did to mess up our OEK lunch routine, I'm not overly excited about going back to school this year. I've always been looking forward to it before, but if I didn't want to pay off the car with my earnings so much, I might not have even gone back. I'm of that high risk age group and would really be justified in just quitting altogether. So, I'll give it a try and see how it goes, but if things go south again, I may quit. We'll see.