My family and I were vacationing in Europe; however I'm not particularly sure if they came over and got me or if this was after I came home. To avoid the usual fights over space, my parents bought a big two-tiered bus, much like the ones you find in Lancaster. I don't particularly recall what we saw on the trip, but I do remember that on the way home, they said that next year we were getting a van. The bus was too much of a gas guzzler, they said, so we were instead going to get one of those vans that schools buy, with the 3 bench seats in the back. That way each one of the kids could still have a seat to themselves. It sounded good to me.

When we got closer to home, we stopped to get groceries, and then shifted the bus into riverboat mode, as we wanted to take the river home. Our course was upstream, into the sunset. We floated up to the bank about 2 miles from my house near a heavily wooded area. The bank was only about a foot high, and then led straight north to an almost entirely flat area. There were several little pools over in that direction, as it was common for the water level to get high enough to cover that area, and then leave water behind when it receded. As a result, it was very sloshy, but my parents insisted on docking there, as my dad said "It's nice and close to your fort."

I was tying the riverbus up to a tree stump and wondering why there was that sunken area where most of the stagnant pools were. It didn't make sense to me, as you'd think the river would be at the lowest point, so all the water could flow down into it. I reached down somewhere and picked up a piece of paper, cos I had a hunch. This paper showed where the river used to be and also where the engineers moved it to. So on the displaced river, I found our location, and then looked just to the north of it and saw that the old river bank was no more than 20 feet away. That explained why there was that channel.

But then I started to panic, because it was at that point I remembered that the fort was nowhere NEAR the river, and we were in unfamiliar territory and it was starting to get dark. Even worse, my family had already wandered off into the woods...

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