January 15, 2005 - With the Pope Family in Carrolton, Texas

We hopped over to Beth and Audie's place for breakfast. Beth had already finished Monika's baby blanket for Peanut, our grandchild-to-be, and we were simply amazed how quickly she installed the backing and satin trim on it. (I'm pretty sure she worked late into the night, but I didn't want to ask.) The result was a blanket with 30 crocheted squares in a 5 x 6 grid representing the 26 letters of the alphabet plus the sun, the moon, a star, and a rainbow.

I worked setting up Carson's bicycle, mainly pumping up the tires and adjusting the seat to his leg length, and after I finished that I decided to take off his training wheels and try to teach him to ride a bicycle. He helped me doing all this work and was interested in the wrenches, nuts, and washers as we removed the training wheels, but he was a bit dubious about trying to ride the bike without the training wheels.

So we took it in stages, first concentrating on just teaching him to steer in such a way as to keep his balance. I pushed from behind his seat and acted as an emergency prop while he tried to learn to steer and keep his balance, which is very different than the type of steering he had learned with the training wheels. Monika later reminded me that I had never even let our boys learn with training wheels because that taught bad habits that they would have had to unlearn to properly ride a bike. The big problem teaching Carson was that I couldn't seem to find the right words to explain how you had to steer to keep your balance before we began-although he is a very smart kid I think I just confused him. It became clearer when we actually tried it out and he almost fell over when he steered the wrong way, but it was in fact hard for him to unlearn the bad habits he had from using those training wheels. I, of course, don't have the stamina I had when I last trained my boys to ride a 2-wheeler about 25 years ago, so after a half hour of pushing the bike up and down the cul-de-sac where they live, we were both pretty exhausted.

We had to take a break for lunch and then viola (Carrie) and violin (Carson) lessons, and I was thinking during the interim that the pushing would be easier if we had a larger, flatter paved surface to try this. The drives around our campsite leapt to mind, and as Carson was interested in seeing our trailer anyway, we drove back to the park with Carson and Lois. Lois had stayed with us right after we bought the trailer in 2004 when we toured Door County (see Wanderung 4), but we had changed our interior lighting and decorations since then so she wanted to see how it looked afterward. For Carson, it was his first visit in a camping trailer, and he was so fascinated by how it all worked that he asked if he could stay overnight with us, which we said we would discuss with his parents. After the tour of the trailer we practiced bicycling some more and Carson became good enough at balancing that I started having him do the pedaling, which greatly reduced the effort I had to put out!

Learning to balance and pedal a bicycle is no mean feat, really, and the funniest description of what can go wrong while learning that I have ever read was by Mark Twain, who said he invariably hit dogs because his route was so random that the dog couldn't predict where he was headed well enough to jump out of his way. Anyway, Carson seemed to be getting the hang of it but was getting tired and so we took a small walk around the campground. Down at the lakeside I taught Carson how to skip stones across the water, another invaluable life skill! We also walked past some funky upright stones vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge that the CCC boys had left standing after creating the park back in the 1930s.

When we stopped meandering around on account of darkness (and cold), we drove over to a nearby Owens restaurant to meet with Beth and Carrie for dinner. It seemed to be run by the same chain that runs Bob Evans restaurants, but with a somewhat different décor and menu. We enjoyed just chatting over dinner for a good long while, and then we returned to camp while they all returned home for the night.