We have posted a lot of stories on our website--in fact, we have a whole section called "stories."

That said, I'll just post one of them here:

The Easy Opening Volvo

There was a time when we spent a week at Lassen Volcanic National Park every summer. We love the place, and compared to some of the other parks in California, Lassen really is undiscovered.

This was in the days when we car-camped with the kids, and we usually stayed at Manzanita Lake Campgound. This was before bear boxes.

The first day we arrived, we set up our camp and had a lovely visit to the lake. At dinner, we grilled some sausages on the BBQ, opened a bottle of wine, and had a delicious dinner on the picnic table.

Manzanita Lake is over 5,000 feet in elevation, and we always feel quite sleepy that first night. We tidied up our campsite, put all the food carefully into our Volvo stationg wagon, and tumbled into bed by about 9:20, and were fast asleep in minutes.

As we slept, we kept hearing odd noises outside. Our older daughter actually expressed some concern about them, but to P they just sounded like someone trying to break up firewood by leveraging it between two trees. Creaking and breaking noises.

After a while, the noises stopped, and we all fell into a deeper slumber.

That's when our neighbors from Sweden woke us up.

"Excuse me," they said. "I think you have a problem with your car."

Hmmm. That didn't sound good.

It turns out that a large mother bear had climbed onto the top of our car, and had pulled open the sunroof. With one paw on the roof, she had used the other paw to peel back the sunroof like a tin of sardines.

She was too big to climb into the car through the opening, and so had finally given up. But the car was now wide open to raccoons or any other animal who wanted to visit, and so we knew we had to come up with a plan.

With our youngest daughter still asleep in the tent, we threw everything else into the car. At the last moment, we woke her up and tossed her sleeping in, and the tent on top. And we drove down to Redding to find a motel for the night.

The next morning we visited a rental car company, where we rented a nice Ford Explorer and headed back up into the park. After all, we only had one week of vacation, and we weren't about to kiss it goodbye.

As we entered the park, the ranger at the entrance station warned us about bear activity. "You know," she said, "last night a bear peeled open a Volvo station wagon to get at the food inside!"

"We know," we replied. "That was our Volvo!"

Epilogue:

At the end of the week, we returned our rental car and picked up our Volvo to drive it home. P got on top of the sunroof and jumped up and down with all his might and weight. He couldn't budge it a millimeter. We drove home with the roof peeled back--by a bear using only one paw.

The next year, Lassen installed bear boxes in its campgrounds. We'd like to think we are responsible for that.