Lost in the Wilderness, Lost in Time

I meant to type this out a week ago, but I guess I needed that much time to recover. Last week I did something I hadn't done since I was a kid. I went camping.

Memorial Day Weekend was spent at Happy Hills Campground, in scenic Hancock, Maryland. Oh and what a weekend it was. As I said, it's been quite some time since Ole Jergy has been camping. So there was with a bit of nostalgic excitement as I drove the family up to Carroll County to meet up with our friends who invited us along to this adventure. Little did I expect to pull in front of their home to see this....

I fully expected to see Cousin Eddie stumble from the vehicle proclaiming the toilet to be at capacity.  We quickly loaded up the RV and started up the road into the unknown. The trip up was fairly uneventful. The amount of stares we received made it feel like we were driving the Bluth Stairs Car (more on Season 4 in a later post). As we took the exit from 70 and went deeper and deeper into the mountains, I felt like any minute we were going to run across Sheriff Rick Grimes and his group of zombie-hacking survivors. The narrow roads up to the campground combined with our rather large vehicle had we knocking back several of the Buds from our two 30-packs. But finally we did make it. The sun was dropping fast so we started setting up as quickly as possible. There is no greater test of skill then setting up a tent in the dark. We threw our bags and such into the tent, and then settled down to call it a day. The freakish weather pushed us all into the camper for the first night. That little space above the cab was to be my tomb for the night. I had a bit more space for a while since both of the kids were arguing over who slept with Ms. J.

I don't actually recall how much time I slept that first night. But it felt like none. I was awake when my wife left the camper at 2am to use the bathroom (oh yeah the camper's bathroom was not operational), a bathroom that was so cold she had to do jumping jacks to keep warm.  I was awake when my friend got up to try and fix the heat in the camper as the temp started to plummet. (no he didn't get it working). I was awake when Ms. J decided to climb up to my bed in order to keep warm. And I was awake when our youngest had to take a 4:30 trip to the lavatory.

When the sun started to finally crack the next morning, there were two missions to accomplish, start a fire, brew some coffee. I was going to need to be at full strength for what I was going to encounter on our first full day camping....