My friends are aware that when I say, “Heh, let’s take a trip to……”, I may or may not know exactly where I am going, it may or may not be by way of a decent main road and it may take an hour to get there or it may take longer.  However, we will definitely find the place, we will definitely love it, our kids will definitely have a fabulous time and I will definitely make sure that we bring food and libations!

As the summer holidays are upon us, the adventure seeking gets turned up a notch, especially as three family members are always back during the summer and they become my sons’ and my touring partners.

There are a lot of weeks to cover with two boys who are 8 and 4.  That being said, the first two weeks are always taken care of by some camp or other.  As of the end of this week, I shall be left with 7 1/2 weeks…..what to do?

Emma’s adventures of Summer 2017 were kick-started by a River Lime at Mount Charles.  My husband and I discovered it a couple weeks previously, thanks to Toyota Jamaica’s 4WD Day Out.  Our boys fell in love with the jumping into the water from the high rocks, I fell in love with sitting in my deckchair in the river itself and it only took one hour to drive from Kingston, so I sent photos to some of my friends immediately and plans were put into place to visit again very soon.

Last Sunday, we met at the bottom of Skyline Drive, top end of Papine.  The drive should only have taken an hour, but……let’s just say that one of the four vehicles in our convoy was rather slow.  I found this strange, mind you, as said driver is usually the first person to pump the pedal.  I don’t know if it’s because he was genuinely concerned about the bottom of his new car scraping the not-so-even-road or if it was some deep-rooted protest against his wife getting him out of his man-den on a Sunday, his one day of rest!  I say we blame the Trini families whom he and I married into!!!  If in doubt, never the fault of us Jamaicans, always the fault of the Trinis!

Anyway, on the way, I get a message from another friend – she and her family asking for directions to one of my secret adventure destinations.  I forgo the information, kindly but hesitantly.  FYI, in my heart, these places belong to ME and should only be visited with me!!!  Believing, rightly so, that actually it would be more fun for the seven of them to join us, I persuade them to change their plans and meet us at the river in Mount Charles instead.  Apparently there were a few rolling of eyes in her car and comments about Aunty Emma’s road trips always taking them to somewhere in the back of beyond!  That’s where the beauty lies, kiddo!

It seems there was another discussion of persuasion going on at the same time in one of the other cars, because before we knew it, we had gone from 19 of us setting out in 4 vehicles to 28 of us arriving in 6 vehicles.  Coolers of rum punch, beer, chicken pelau, KFC chicken, mac n cheese, banana muffins, chocolate biscuit cake…..you name it, we brought it and we ate it!  Oh, let’s not forget my homemade marshmallows toasting in the flames that my wannabe-Survivor-Reality-Show-Contestant husband and the 11 boy children fired up.

Yes, 11 boy children between the ages of 4 and 17……need I say more about the antics of the day or the fact that pulling these boys away from the river at the end of the afternoon was a feat in itself?  Not that any of the grownups wanted to leave either.  It’s hard work picking your deckchair up out of a fresh, crystal clear river and heading home to the reality of Monday morning, only a short 12 hours away.