Long time gone

Last week I had a sort of out-of-nowhere vacation. I've only been at my new job about a month, so by rights I shouldn't have had a vaca, but that I'd already committed to this week long before I switched jobs. The week was Sister Camping Trip week, and I joined my sisters (minus one honorary-sister, who just wouldn't come) on a trip to Camden, ME (the way life should be).
By the time we'd got to Augusta, it had started to pour, and it kept on raining right up to the point when we finally got our tarp up over our site. (We had excitedly pulled out the screen tent my sister brought, thinking we'd put that up over the table and lounge and wait out the rain- but although we did have the screen tent, for some reason we didn't have the poles.)
This was kind of half-camping, with the fire mostly for show and most of our cooking tools went unused... but in our defense, it rained about half the time we were there.
We visited a lot of fun shops, ocean-side-town-kind of shops, and ate out at some pretty great spots, crested mount Battie (by car), picnicked with my brother and his family, and visited my nephew at Summer camp. The trip topped off with a deeeeelish dinner at my sisters' house, with most of my family there, and a little birthday celebration for several of us.
I am the youngest of five, and there's a big gap in between kids 3 and 4, effectively slicing us into two little sub-sets of kids. My brother and I are a year and 2 days apart. And growing up, my oldest sister and I were WORLDS apart (a whopping 10 years- doesn't seem like that much now, but then, it was big). My middle sister is the hub of the family; all of us connect to her and through her. It's funny how alike we are, after all, and how different.
It was fun hanging out with my sisters last week, and I hope we'll do it again.