The end of another season is always bittersweet, isn’t it?  They just seem to fly by, faster and faster every year.  I usually struggle with the transition from summer to fall, because I love both seasons, so I never know what to feel.  Sad that summer is ending?  Check.  Excited about all the fall fun ahead?  Check.  I’m a basket case.  But this summer has been so weird – I’m kind of glad it’s on the way out.  We had terrible family sadness, lots of unexpected separations, and rain almost every weekend.  We tried, so hard, to have fun and enjoy the season, but it mostly just sucked.

• Family vacation season!  Spend a week on Lake Placid – hiking, kayaking, and swimming from sun-up to sun-down.  Check!  We had a wonderful week away in late August with my parents.  We hiked almost every day, took the kayaks out for a romantic paddle, and splashed in Mirror Lake until we shivered.  We celebrated Peanut’s sixth birthday on vacation and just unplugged as much as possible and soaked in time together.

• Related: climb another high peak (or two).  Check!  Thanks to my parents, who generously babysat the kids from sun-up (literally: we picked Nana up before it was even light out) to bedtime, Steve and I were able to spend a whole day in the mountains together, soaking up the silence and views and notching another high peak – Big Slide Mountain, this time.  Recap coming soon!

• Read The Summer Book by Tove Jansson.  Check!  I read it on vacation, which seemed appropriate, and really enjoyed this lovely, ruminative book about a young girl and her grandmother and their long summer days spent together.
• Fill up on sweet summer greens and juicy stone fruits from the farmers’ market.  We never made it to the farmers’ market.
• Start running again!  Haha, this is funny!
• Pick blueberries at Butler’s Orchard and bake something yummy with Peanut.  It would’ve had to stop raining.
• Hike Big Meadows at Shenandoah National Park.  Again, would’ve had to stop raining.
• I don’t know if this’ll happen, but I want it to, so I’m putting it on the list: spend a weekend with Rebecca on Virginia Beach.  Well, Rebecca had only one functioning bedroom and no HVAC all summer, so this didn’t happen.
• Get my bike tires pumped up, figure out how to hitch up the kids’ trailer, and start taking some family bike rides on the Mount Vernon Trail.  I got my bike tuned in hopes of biking to work, and it has rained every day since.  Literally.  Every.  Day.
• Kayak Fletcher’s Cove as much as possible, and check out the Ballpark Boathouse too.  I have faith and believe that Fletcher’s Cove and the Ballpark Boathouse both exist, but I haven’t seen them all year.

I can hardly believe it, but that’s the extent of it.  The wet weather this summer really hampered our fun – we never went to the farmers’ market or to the DC boathouses at all; we missed blueberry season; we never got the bikes out; and we didn’t have time for either Shenandoah or Virginia Beach.  The fall is shaping up to be just as wet as the summer, and if it doesn’t stop raining on the weekends soon, I am going to seriously lose my mind.

How was your summer?  I hope you checked more off your list than I did off mine!