Our van gets going early for lots of ordinary things like work and school. When we have free time it can be so tempting to sleep in and skip whatever early thing is happening.
I feel this even more when on vacation. There is pressure to relax, and pressure to squeeze in as much sightseeing as possible. Rushing around to everyplace/everything can feel exhausting and overwhelming. How do you know when to push yourself and get up early, or when to stay in your cozy sleeping bag?
I don’t know the answer, but I am sure we did the right thing getting up early on our “West trip” in summer of 2017. Our son had his heart set on camping at the Jenny Lake campground in Grand Teton National Park. This campground is one of several in Grand Teton that is first come, first served. No reservations means that people must arrive EARLY to get one of the coveted spots. Some people arrive in the middle of the night and park at the nearby visitor’s center to wait for campers to leave.
The night before, we camped at Mike Harris campground in the Caribou-Targhee National Forest near Victor, Idaho. It is a little over an hour between there and the much-talked about Jenny Lake. We read that it’s best to arrive before 8am, so we planned our time table from there.
Un-camping (packing up all camp stuff) before dawn is tricky, but we made it work and somehow got on the road at a good time. We got a few blurry shots of the sunrise over the Wyoming/Idaho border area too.
We arrived at Jenny Lake around 7:30am, and found just a few sites available on our first drive around the campground. Thankfully we got one, whew! It was a great place to explore the park from, more central than Gros Ventre campground at the southern end of the park, or Coulter Bay at the north end.
Our last morning in Jenny Lake, I was in my usual flurry of un-camping, trying to organize the van, keep stuff clean, eat breakfast and who knows what else. The kids took a short walk to look at the lake with their cups of cocoa. They ran back and wanted me to see the spot they found. I grudgingly stopped un-camping for a minute to follow them. This is the view I saw:
This time, getting up early was well worth it.