the great outdoors

This past weekend, a few friends of mine and I decided to get in touch with mother nature. It first started out with "hey, (rd) what are you doing this weekend?" "thinking about going hiking" "ooh there is this place that (annoying boy) was talking about where you can go tubing! and they have a campsite too" "ooohhhh LETS GO CAMPING!"

So we went camping. Me, "Stella", "basher" and "gentle giant" drove 1 1/2 hours away to Boone in the mountains. When we got to the site, we were the only ones there. It was quite ghetto, no running water, just a porta poddy and some stream. We set up our tent, which the bag says "can be assembled in 10 minutes". YEAH...except we didn't have the instructions, so it took us ohh.. about 45 minutes. Only after we finished we found the directions hidden in another box. go figure.

Then we went tubing with what little day light we had left. For those of you who don't know (ah-hem, mr moc) tubing is when you get into an inflatable tube and just float. Of course we did it red neck style out here in NC and attached a spare tube with beer in it and we did it down a dirty river. When we went tubing, there is a part in the river where you have to stop at a "bridge" get out and get back in. Well, washed up on the bridge was a DEAD PIG (or so we though, later to find out it was a badger). GROSS! We were swimming/tubing with that thing!

Afterwards, we made ourselves some din din. Basher made a nice fire pit and we were able to cook some hot dogs! We put the hot dogs on sticks and held them out over fire. We topped them off with buns, ketchup, Dijon (all i had), and relish. Yum. We lost a couple dogs in the fire though. The dogs were accompanied by potato salad. and OF COURSE... we had Smores! I make the best smores! =)

Post dinner, we hit the sack. Since we didn't exactly get the cover for the tent from our friend, we had nothing to protect us from the rain, so we moved under the picnic shelter. However, the ground under the picnic shelter was slanted, so we all slept slanted and started to slide toward the bottom in the middle of the night. Well, as we were trying to sleep Stella freaked out cause a spider crawled on her. Then, as we were falling asleep we saw a light flickering (we were the only ones at the camp site). I gently poked Gentle Giant who got up and checked - it was the campfire that we thought we put out, but apparently came back to life. It was a rough night of sleep. I kept waking up, largely in part because Gentle Giant was snoring so loudly, but also because i got so hot in my sleeping bag because i didnt want my arms to hang out and have the bug bite me! Plus I was scared a bear, psycho killer, or alien might make a visit.

In the A.M. we went tubing again for 3 hours. It was so much fun and I got sunburnt! There were a couple of snakes that Basher and Gentle Giant saw, but luckily i didn't see them or I would have started crying right there. Afterwards, we packed up camp and hit up Jersey Mike's. YES! Real food! It was a great weekend, I wish I could do it more.

--RD