jjstark4 We recently put our RV in a spot in Parker, AZ for the summer and we’ve been spending the majority of our weekends there. If you know me, you know I love the river. I love to travel and I love exploring new destinations, but when I think about my favorite place, it will probably always be the river. When I think about my hopes and dreams, my mind always takes me to summers on the water; a boat and a trailer.
Before softball got serious, my family used to spend almost every weekend during the summers at Lake Havasu, Arizona. Some of my fondest memories growing up were made at Black Meadow Landing, an RV resort we stayed at with our neighbors (my childhood best friends) and my dads high school best friend and his family.
So many memories were made at Black Meadow Landing and Lake Havasu. Here’s a few.
There was a store there that had these huge Otter pops and at nighttime we’d ask our parents for money and we’d all run down to the store and buy ice cream and then go sit by the dock and eat them together while telling stories.
My dad is the manager of a golf cart company and when we were younger, he tricked out this golf cart with truck wheels and made it go like 60 miles an hour. We’d drive it around the park, and I remember thinking we were just so much cooler than everyone else with their basic, slow golf carts. BORING.
I watched my first R rated movie in Kevin’s (my dads best friend) trailer with my brother and Kevin’s daughter Mary. I don’t remember how old I was but somehow she convinced my brother it wasn’t that bad of a movie and that we’d be fine. I think we only made it like 10 minutes into the movie. My dad happened to walk in during a very graphic sex scene and just very calmly said, “Yea let’s maybe not have Jayme watch this”. My brother was mortified because if you know my brother, he is the angel child and he felt terrible.
At Lake Havasu I learned how to wake board and we loved to go tubing. You’d yell, “Hit it!” to signal the driver to start, thumbs up to go faster, thumbs down to slow down, and hand by your neck to stop. We’d just sit there with our thumbs up, egging the driver on to try and flip us off the tube. We’d go to Copper Canyon and jump off the rocks and we’d spend our afternoons at the Channel. I loved it all.
I was the definition of a tomb boy. Baggy boy shorts and always barefoot. No ponytail. I refused to wear my hair up. One time we stopped in the middle of the lake to let everyone cool off in the water for a bit and my dad and Kevin pulled these board shorts out of the water. They were perfectly my size. How do I know this? Some how they convinced me to try them on or maybe I wanted to, I’m not sure. But, they were the perfect fit and I thought they were the raddest shorts I had ever seen. So much so that I proceeded to wear them almost every day for like yearsss. Years. We had nicknames on the back of our jerseys in 8u All-Stars and mine was surfer chick because I’d wear the damn board shorts to practice.
When I was little I had an entire shoe box filled with these dice beads I collected from the Channel. Like two years ago, we were on Kevin’s boat driving into the Channel and a group of guys were yelling, “Who wants beads?!”. My face lit up thinking back to my childhood and I immedietely stood up and threw my hands in the air and yelled, “ME!!!”. I’ve never seen Jordan react so fast. He pushed me right back down in my seat and said, “You really want to flash your chest in front of your whole family?”. I said, “Wait what? I just wanted beads?”.
Jordan: “That’s how you get the beads Jayme.”
Apparently they just give them out to cute kids because I had absolutely no idea that that’s what they were for.
Anyway, the point of my trip down memory lane is that being in an RV at the river this summer has brought up so many fond memories for me. It’s not Black Meadow Landing, but our weekends have still been amazing so far. The river has always been something Jordan and I share a love for. He grew up similarly; always at the river with his family, making his own memories. One of our first “dates” Jordan took me to this spot in Blythe that he grew up going to and we’ve now spent countless weekends there since.
Watching Jordan take a leap of faith this past year and go to Lineman School and take a new job across the county was hard. It was tough staying behind and working on my own career. It was tough finally deciding to move out there, only to move right back home a month later. But, it has been such a blessing watching the right doors slowly start to open for us. I am just so thankful for how things have begun to unravel exactly how they were meant to. We certainly don’t have it all, not even close. But, I am constantly in awe of just how far we’ve come. How we’ve trusted the process and gone after our goals. How we’ve worked hard and continue to hold big dreams.
I am looking forward to making so many more memories with friends and family in that RV at our little spot in Parker this summer.
As always, travel on my friends.