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The Secret to Being One of the Happiest People

It’s not just getting whatever you want

Anneliese Rider
4 min readAug 28, 2020
Photo by Cindy Chen on Unsplash

For the fifth morning that week, it was raining. Condensation dripped onto me from the roof of the tent, the rain pitter-pattered outside, and my damp sweatpants clung to my legs. I sighed.

Not again.

I grew up in Colorado, so the year after we were married, Curtis and I decided to take a camping trip from Chicago to the campground in the Rocky Mountains that I’d grown up going to.

The first day we got there, we chose a campsite that was on the high side of the campground, on a gravel rise. We wanted a site closer to the river, but there were none available.

Little did we know how fortuitous that would be.

A light drizzle the next morning left me unphased, and I made a fire to cook breakfast. The rain continued through the day, but we stayed around the campground and kept the fire going with sticks and logs from the nearby woods.

“Don’t worry,” I told Curtis. “I’m sure it won’t rain tomorrow.”

Of course, as it so often happens with proclamations like that, I was absolutely wrong. It was raining the next morning. We donned rain slickers and went exploring, hiking through the woods and down by the swollen river.

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Anneliese Rider
Anneliese Rider

Written by Anneliese Rider

Published author, freelance writer and editor, biking enthusiast, and blogger at annelieserider.com.

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