Life is about to get good. That’s what Memorial Day weekend means to me. Because I love summer and this is the beginning of summer. I don’t care if the Summer Solstice isn’t until late June—I don’t follow the hippie calendar, I follow the redneck calendar so I know it’s summer when I see the first barefoot kid at Walmart and the first Jet Ski on the French Broad River. And both of those events will happen this weekend, so that’s when summer hits.
The reason why I love summer so much is obvious: tank tops and car camping, outdoor ping pong battles and tubing trips, day drinking and waterfall seeking, mountain biking and skinny dipping…And when Memorial Day weekend arrives, I’m fairly ready itching to do all of it at once. The problem is, the powers that be only give us three days to jump head first into summer’s festivities and you simply cannot do everything that is great and weather dependent in 72 short hours. I want to take the kids camping, but also kick off bike/bar crawl season. I want to see a baseball game but also go mountain biking. Hit the Mountain Sports Festival to revel in the crowds, but also hike deep into the forest to escape all of the tourists. I absolutely have to play ping pong on the concrete table of one of my favorite bars, but then I wouldn’t be able to host a cookout at my house. And what about the beginning of the Suburban Lawn Games tournament? That should kick off this weekend too.
The long weekend just isn’t long enough. So I’m going to have to focus, maintain a steady diet of Red Bull and Burial Beer’s Innertube Beer and simply try to knock out as many adventures as I possibly can in the next 72 hours. It won’t be easy, but this is what I’ve been training for all Spring. Summer is here. F$&ck yeah.
