Emma Philbrook: STUDENT LIFE

I had glorious plans for this week which involved Bennington Lake and my little blue kayak, but due to the wildfire situation, Bennington Lake is closed to boaters lest they be unwittingly scooped up by water-carrying helicopters. But because I’m still in a lake-y state of mind, I think I’ll reminisce about the wonderful trip to Lake Pend Oreille I took a couple weeks ago.

Five of us went – me, my mom, Chris, Chris’s friend Kyle, and my cousin Ariel. We traveled to Sandpoint, Idaho, in my grandparents’ miniature motorhome.

It was pretty close quarters. Ariel and I rode up strapped into the dinette benches, she with her sketchpad and I with my embroidery bag. Along the way, she tried to draw and I tried to stitch. The lack of decent shock absorbers made both of our tasks a good deal harder and mine relatively painful.

The boys rode up seated on the couch. For the first part of the trip, they dinked around on their phones. When we got into the hilly part of the trip, reception cut out and they both fell asleep. Then Ariel started nodding off. As a result, the next two hours of the trip were almost completely silent, save for my occasional yelps of pain.

When we arrived at the campsite, Ariel and I darted out to the lake shore. The water was freezing, but it felt good to stretch out and have a cool breeze on our faces. Over the course of fifteen minutes, we wandered slowly out until the water reached midway up our calves, shivering all the while.

Suddenly, the boys appeared from behind us and cannonballed into the water, sprinkling both of us generously.

For reasons which were important to our mutual sanity, Ariel and I tended to split away from the boys in the mornings. We strolled up and down Sandpoint’s gorgeous downtown, hitting up fair-trade boutiques and toy stores and rockhound shops and Scandinavian import dealers and everything in between.

Meanwhile, the boys zipped around on their skateboards, befriending cute Canadian girls and chugging lattes. We both spent a couple afternoons on the lake, swimming or just floating.

In the evenings, we would meet back at the motorhome for dinner and card games. We played “Scum” a lot, mostly because we enjoyed calling each other “Scum”. One night we played a complicated board game called “Betrayal at the House on a Hill,” which was a ton of fun once we wrapped our heads around the rules.

On the last night, we decided to go out for dinner. A couple people felt like Italian food, so I found a restaurant called Ivano’s that was only a block or so from the campsite. What my research hadn’t made clear was that Ivano’s was super pricey and rather elegant. Of course, we didn’t know the prices until we had already been seated and were looking at the menu, and we were too embarrassed to leave.

Chris and Ariel split an entrée, Mom got a salad, Kyle had ice cream, and I ordered white chocolate mousse. It was delicious, but we weren’t full, so we wandered downtown to a restaurant called Jalapeno’s for quesadillas, smoothies, and chips. It was a fun evening, a great finale to a great trip.

Of course, I’m still bummed out about Bennington.

But the memories help.