When I’m at the Hufford’s house, I’m always treated as one of the family. We hang around at the house, eat together, play games and just have a fun time. I take care of the supply of ice cream and also cook a meal here and there. Even though the two oldest girls of the family have moved out to their own house last year, they still stop by every day to spend time with their family. Everyone here is really close with each other and that’s very nice.
On the first day that I’m here, Eva has planned a fun day for her, her brother Jude and me. We’re doing some rock climbing at a place called ‘Balanced rock’, a rock that’s stacked on top of other rocks and somehow stays in balance with only one point of support. We then continue driving to a huge waterfall. When we arrive there, I realize that it’s the same waterfall I visited last year on my roadtrip with Matt. It’s nice to see it again and we sit down in the nearby park to enjoy our lunch package. After lunch we drive a bit further to another large waterfall where you can actually walk behind the water. As you can see in the pictures, this waterfall is really high. We walk around it for a while until more people show up. We have great timing today, in the morning we were the first at the rocks before other people showed up and it’s the same here at the waterfall. We drove several hours to get to the rocks and the waterfalls and I realize again that it’s such a difference with Europe. It’s completely normal to drive two hours here to get somewhere, back home we don’t do that so often. The roadtrip of today is really fun and we play loud music and enjoy the ride. The last stop for today is a big blue lake surrounded by canyons. After a hike of about two miles we get to the lake and get ready for a swim. The water is super cold, some of the coldest water I’ve ever swum in. Fortunately it’s a very hot day like it’s been the last week or so. It’s about 35°C / 95°F outside and so the water is nice and refreshing. We stay in and around the lake for quite a while until it’s evening and time to make the two hour drive back home. After this great outdoors day I feel quite hungry and get the idea to cook a big pan of pasta for the family. We get some groceries on our way home and not much later we’re enjoying Italian spaghetti at the dinner table. We end most days here with watching a movie, they have some nice old comedy movies that I haven’t seen before like ‘Daddy’s home 2’ and ‘A family man’.
Because I wake up earlier than most of the family here I do a bit of work on some mornings and have some relaxed reading time on other mornings. It helps me to stay a bit on top things while being able to have fun the rest of the days. One day Jude comes up with another fun thing that you probably can’t do back home: axe throwing. Jude has three axes and in turns we throw them at the old oak tree in the backyard. I’m surprisingly good at it and enjoy this game a lot. While writing this, I look at Amazon and see that you can actually also buy throwing axes in the Netherlands, so I might continue this hobby when I’m back home.
Because I’m spending more days with family and friends during this vacation, I’m missing out on some national parks and places I’d like to visit. It’s something that crosses my mind while deciding how long I want to stay at places, but one of my goals of this vacation is to relax, so I’m okay with that. Tomorrow I plan to continue driving back to California and visit Yosemite National Park and Sequoia Tree National Park, two places that are high on my list to visit again, and I hope to do some hiking there.
