Old Stuff

Camping Notes

Camping news: we spent Sunday night at lot 19 in Grove campground in the Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky, and Monday-Saturday at lot 6 in Tsali CG in the Nantahala NF in western North Carolina near Sylva and Cherokee (the reservation, etc.) Tsali is the Spandex capital of the free world - apparently the Fontana Lake area is popular with folks who own both kayaks and mountain bicycles, and Lord knows you can't ride a mountain bike without wearing Spandex. And then there was us (not exactly your kayak and mountain bike sort of folks) with an 8-month-old who went off two or three times a night.

Both campgrounds were "developed", which means they had bathrooms, showers and drinking water, so there were no real adventures like falling off the side of a mountain, which a couple of friends of mine almost did during a real camping & climbing trip last year. We did do the tenting in cold weather thing, and the even better tenting in an 18-hour rain storm thing. And there was the great snake hunt, which I described to our 4-year-old girl and 5-year-old boy thusly:

"There's an old camping tradition that we need to follow when we're camping in a tent in the mountains. Sometimes you have to get up in the middle of the night and take everything out of your tent just to make sure it's clean. It's just one of those fun things we do when we're camping."

We didn't find a snake and the slithering noise in the tent remains unexplained.

Then there was the Clampetts Go to Town episode, in which all our cooking supplies fell out of the van with a loud, long, un-Godly clatter in the parking lot next to the Sylva visitors information center and the town library. The folks in the info center who saw and heard the whole sorry production did a really good job keeping straight faces while I asked for directions to local stores.

Thanks to our hemorrhaging Ford Taurus that spilled its oil in front of a friend's house two days before we left, we had $300 less to camp on than we had planned. That cancelled the Pensacola - Mobile - Route 45 leg of the trip and brought us home with $1.92 to spare. Whee! Father Dubay says that poverty is essential to holiness 0;^)

Note to self: read this, this and this before camping again.

Posted by billw at October 24, 2002 10:38 AM