Adventures In Camping


Saturday
I have been writing about camping and saving it on a floppy disk, planning on using the computer at work to put this in the Cud, but it's been more of a pain than I thought it would be. I had it saved in Microsoft Word, but the computer at work doesn't have Word on it, just WordPad and NotePad. I tried opening it in WordPad, but it ended up with all the formatting gibberish mixed up with the text, so I am going to save it now in WordPad and see if I can't get it to work this time. You would think the phone company would have state of the art computers, but you'd be wrong. The computers we use with the customers actually use Windows 95, if you can believe that.

Another fun day of camping. The other girl that was camping with us had to go home, but there is another girl camping with us now. The Girl has spent a lot of time swimming in the lake, but I haven't done any swimming. My husband got in the lake and said it was pretty gross, muddy and full of algae or something floating around. That doesn't bother The Girl, and I don't think it would bother me all that much because I'm used to those conditions. He's a city boy originally, so if there isn't chlorine involved he doesn't think it's fit to swim in. Plus he said he could feel fish swimming against his legs, and you know what fish do in the water. He didn't like swimming in fish pee.

We think the raccoons got more food Thursday night. My husband cooked 2 chickens and swears he had some left that he put in a bag, but now nobody can find it. At first we thought it might have been in my brother's cooler, but it wasn't. We heard some raccoons rustling around while we were all sitting around the campfire, but didn't think anything about it. We were more careful last night and put everything up in the trunk of the car before we started sitting around watching the fire.

We have a new game for the Olympics now. The people at the campsite next to ours have a game called Hobo Golf. There is a square made of skinny PVC pipe, with two more pipes coming up from opposite sides of the base. There are three horizontal pipes connecting the upright posts, sort of like a ladder. Drill holes in golf balls and tie pairs of them together with rope about two feet long. You hold one of the golf balls, swing the connected golf ball back and forth a couple of times, and then throw it at the horizontal pipes.

Each pipe has a different point value. The kids that were playing it explained the scoring, but my husband didn't like their rules so he said he was going to make up his own scoring system. According to the neighbors, the top bar is worth 1 point, the middle is worth 5, and the bottom is worth 3. The first person to score 21 wins. Both players throw their balls, I think you have two or three sets apiece like in horseshoes, and then subtract the scores. If you scored 6 and I scored 5, you would subtract my 5 from your 6, so you would end up with a score of 1. The kids said you score like that because otherwise the game is over too fast, but I don't see why you couldn't just increase the winning score to make the game last longer instead of having to do all that complicated arithmetic.



Friday
My brother and his daughter are also up here camping. She's about 6, and loves it here. As soon as they got here she wanted to go swimming. She was barely able to control herself while her dad put up the tent. As soon as she got up this morning she wanted to go back to the beach. Who needs breakfast when there is swimming to be done and seashells to be collected? They stayed last night, but are leaving today. Right now they are taking down their tent and she is actually helping, asking questions and giving her daddy plenty of advice.

I'm surprised she isn't putting up a fuss about having to leave so soon, but I think she wants to show her mom all the seashells she collected. They are just clamshells, about the size of nickels, but they might as well be solid gold as far as she is concerned. Some of them are still alive, and I'm sure unless her mom or dad manages to sneak them out of the baggie they are in they will start to reek after a week or so.

There are a lot of dogs here. My husband won't bring our dogs. I can understand not wanting to bring Little Dog up here, because she would spend all day barking at the other dogs or the kids riding back and forth on bicycles. She is a high-strung, yappy dog. Even I have to admit that. Buddy would be a lot better up here, because the best word to describe him is lazy. He would keep an eye on the other dogs, and make sure they didn't come over to our campsite, but wouldn't run all over barking like Little Dog would.

It's nice up here, but pretty crowded. There are no camping vacancies. When anybody leaves their campsite somebody else pulls into it in about a half an hour. There are 3 sections here, primitive, electric, or electric and water. We are in the electric section. It's nice to be able to use my laptop while I'm camping, but it would be even nicer if I had internet access so I could post these blog entries. I would like to be in the primitive section because I think the campsites are nicer, but we need electric for my husband's C-PAP machine he uses when he sleeps. He could get an adapter so he could run it with a battery instead needing an electrical outlet, but we don't have one. I think we are the only people in this section of the park in a tent. There is another family that has a tent up, but they also have a pop-up camper.


Thursday
My husband and The Girl decided we needed to go camping. It didn't matter that we didn't have anything to go camping with besides a lantern and a propane camp stove, and the fact that I have to work Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Camping we went. We bought chairs, a couple of air mattresses, a cooler, and a great big tent. The tent is supposed to sleep 9. I'm sure sooner or later The Girl will have a big sleepover and test the limit of the tent.

While my husband was setting up the campsite I went shopping with The Girl and a friend of hers who came camping with us. I was looking for a bathing suit, but couldn't find one I liked. At least not one in my price range. I can be extremely stingy. I did go to a nursery and bought some flowers and groundcovers for the flowerbed. I also bought a couple of herb plants, rosemary and thyme I think, to keep my lonely sage plant company.

By the time we got to the park my husband already had the tent put up. I don't know how he managed to put it up without any help. It's a huge tent, and it was windy, so it was a challenge. Especially since he couldn't read the instructions. He needs new glasses. He has a new pair on the way, but they aren't in yet. He has very bad eyesight and can hardly read with the glasses he has now. The eye doctor who tested him told him he is getting the strongest bifocal possible. If his eyes get any worse he's just going to have to get a pair of black glasses and a white cane. Or at least learn Braille because he can still see what's going on around him, he just can't read or see any details close up.

We're staying in the same state park we lived in during the Flood of 93. We lived here for two or three months, with two dogs and two cats. My brother and his two dogs, and my sister Mary with her husband and two kids lived up here, too. Her daughter, about 6 or 7 years old at the time, decided it was a good time to fall down and break her arm, and my brother's German Shepherd decided it was a good time to go into heat. It was just one thing after another.

Last night we had a good time. We met some of our camping neighbors. One of them was a little tipsy, and kept telling us he went to Bass Pro Shop and bought 3 chairs. We heard about the Bass Pro Shop and those 3 chairs all night long. My husband cooked hamburgers for dinner, then cooked some Italian sausage links for later. He put them in a Ziploc bag and put that in a cooler by the tent. Later in the night, while we were sitting around the campfire, we saw a raccoon sneak around the side of the tent. Everybody thought it was so cute. Then it looked at us, turned around, opened the cooler, grabbed the bag of sausages and ran away. It did everything but wave or flip us off. My husband suddenly didn't think the raccoon looked all that cute.

We stayed up way too late, and I have to work late all weekend. I think it's because a lot of people at work are on vacation. Usually I work from about noon to 8ish, but this weekend I have to work 3ish to 11ish. It's really going to suck driving back here in the dark. At least it isn't supposed to rain.