Wrote this 20 years ago

[jgilliam1955]

FIRST TIME CAMPING

Just wanted to tell you about our camping trip last weekend. It was like you say, ‘very relaxing & fun’.

It was just Nancy, 2 dogs, and yours truly. We brought along the dog cages for 3 reasons.

1. Dogs don't travel well in the car, so we put them in the cages.
2. Put the cages on the extra bed & the dog's sleep in there.
3. If I make Nancy mad at me, I'll be sleeping in the cage.

We got to this wonderful campground. It was in the country in a valley next to a large creek. It had a wonderful waterfall.
We pulled in and a small crowd gathered to watch me put up the trailer. (Since it is the kind that folds up & down they wanted to see it.) I got out & pretended I didn't notice them. I walked back to the back & lifted & pulled to raise the trailer. I pulled my guts out before I realized I hadn't unlatched the hooks yet. (Crowds make me nervous. Nancy pointing at the hooks and saying, "shouldn't these be unhooked?” didn't help either.) After I finally got the trailer set up, (The crowd had left after seeing I didn't know what I was doing.) I hooked up the electricity but did not notice the water I was standing in. Nancy asked through the window what that thump was? I told her" nothing" as I picked myself back up. (But the plug stayed plugged in, so we had lights) I hooked up the water ok, even though my hands were still shaking. Once inside I setup the walls and made sure everything worked. Nancy asked me "Why is your hair standing up & your shoes are smoking?" I just mumbled a reply.
Later on after walking the creek and sitting by the waterfall, Nancy was able to hold my hand without getting a static shock. We ended up having a nice cool night walk around the campground. Then we retired into the camper for the night.
Then we did what all married couples do on a camping trip-SLEEP.
Just Nancy & Big Daddy & no kids. We just stared in each other’s eyes and asked, "What do we do now?" So we broke out a movie & made popcorn.
When we went to sleep, I was too tired to cut on the heat. Big mistake. About 2:30 AM, Nancy punched me and said, “I’m freezing. Is there something wrong with the furnace, or did you forget to turn it on? I think she said this. It could have been, "Dear, I'm a little chilly. Could you find your way over to the thermostat and turn it on, please."
Now the next day, as we packed to leave, I forgot my list on how to put the trailer down. So it only took 3 times to close, open, fix the problem, and close the camper before it was good enough to travel. Of course, I didn't do a walk around, So Nancy's panties hanging out the window the whole trip back kinda upset Nancy, but I thought the guys (and 3 girls) driving by & waving, smiling, yelling for a phone number was kind of cute.
So it was a very nice trip. We are going away again Thursday night until Sat. We will be staying near Thomas Jefferson's home. Our daughter will be watching the dogs this time, so I'll have the cages to myself.

JACK

[jgilliam1955]

Our Second Camping Trip

Well, Nancy and I went camping again. We stayed at a place called Misty Mountain. I found it on the Internet. It is located right outside Skyline Drive here in Virginia. We knew we would get in late, so we made reservations for a Thursday & Friday.
We loaded up the camper with the usual stuff, you know, blankets, sleeping bags, crackers, drinks,
TV with a DVD player (a must-have), kitchen sink, bathtub, and anything else we could empty out of the house into the trailer & SUV!
My god! How do people pack for a week? We were going for two days. I told the wife, why don’t we hire a moving van & they could deliver the stuff to our campsite. Then my wife informed me the grandbaby (5 months) Ava, would be coming with us. I said, “good, her first camping trip.” So when we stopped by to pick her up, her mom (our lovely college-educated daughter) had packed Ava’s stuff like she was going away to college. (Why does a baby take so much equipment just to live from one poopy diaper to the next?)
So as my wife & her daughter acted like they hadn’t seen each other in years, I carried everything to the pack mule…err, I mean SUV. How I did it to this day, I just don’t know. Why the windows didn’t blow out is a mystery to me.
I notified the chatting couple it was getting late & we had to hit the side roads to avoid the state police. (I know we had to be violating several state laws & a few SPCA laws.)
Grammy sat in the back seat & played with Ava. I was just glad to be moving again without the tires blowing out.
We got to Misty Mountain at about 10:30 pm. I was tired, the wife was asleep & Ava was pooping for the 3rd time. The manager had a map & a lot of numbers pined next to the office door. I thought, wow, this place is squared away. After driving up the mountain, my thoughts turned sour when I saw the lot. Half the lot was level & the door side of the lot had a slope that worried me.
I stopped & walked the site & my flashlight couldn’t see the bottom. But I brushed bats away from my throat as they came out of the pit towards my flashlight. I hid my fear as I told the wife, “What a nice site. Can’t wait to see the sunrise from here.” She calmly asks, “Are you sure we aren’t going to tip over or something?” I shook my head no, worried my shaking voice would give me away as I drove us towards our death -I mean onto the lot.
I noticed we were next to a fifth-wheel trailer. I thought that maybe he’d call 911 for me. I soon found out as I was hooking up & trying to be quiet (which you can’t be late at night), that he would not be calling 911 for me. As I was setting up, they kept flashing their lights off and on real fast. I found out I could read light language.
It read “you are making too much noise, you jerk, and I hope you fall down that abyss you are parked next to!” (Turned out he lived there.)
I had to use the level jacks on the door side of the trailer. They were cranked all the way up & the tire wasn’t touching the ground. (The tire was so high I was worried about an eagle making a nest in the trailer axle. That would be a whole different set of problems.)
As I got my lovely family out of the vehicle & walked them to the trailer, My wife asked, “Is this safe, and where did these bats come from?”
“Sure, it’s safe; just keep the baby’s throat covered,” I replied.
She couldn’t see the tears running down my cheeks because I stayed in the dark. (Of course, the guy in the fifth wheel didn’t help either by flashing the lights off & on.) When we got in the trailer, I immediately jumped into the bed & said “I’m tired, see ya in the morning.” As I covered my body with all the pillows and blankets to help me survive the disaster, I knew what was coming with each step my wife took.
As she was leaning towards the pit, she'd say, “I feel like I have an ear infection & my balance is off.”
“Just don’t fall against the door. I’m not sure about the lock.” I mumbled between prayers. Every time I peeped out that night, my wife would be sitting up with her feet braced against the wall. (The next morning, she stated she kept sliding out of bed.)

At about 4:30 AM, the guy in the fifth-wheel trailer must have had trouble with his truck. He kept gunning his engine real loud and honking his horn. I ignored him because I was up to the letter “Z” praying to the god “Zeus”. (I was covering all the bases. I didn’t want my lovely wife in eternity with me saying, “I told you so!”)
The next morning the manager allowed us to move to a very nice secluded level lot, which I kissed as soon as I parked the trailer. (I think the nervous twitch & wild look gave me away because he just looked at me & said, “Here, use lot U13; you’d like that better.” I grabbed the map and ran laughing all the way back to the death trap. (Had to go back and get my vehicle once my wife asked, “Where’s the SUV?”)
Let me tell you, fellow campers. There is nothing like a level lot. If I had found a bottle and rubbed it until a Genie popped out and gave me 3 wishes, I would of yelled out “a Level lot” 3 times so fast your head would spin.
(I did keep looking out the window, making sure the ground had not moved.)
The rest of the time was very enjoyable. We changed the grandbaby, walked the grandbaby, and changed her some more. We all had a peaceful stay.
As we were leaving, I laughed madly to myself as a big diesel was trying to park next to the abyss.
Overall Misty Mountain is a very nice campground. Just ask for a level lot.

Jack & Nancy

[Raspy]

Very funny! Really enjoyed the stories.

[RogerDat]

I'm not sure but a thread about those trips that were memorable for shall we say "unusual but interesting reasons" although I would guess some of the things that we run into camping are only unusual for us individually rather than as a group. Which is what made that story so funny.

I don't take the dog cages camping because I wake up with a crick in my neck when I have to sleep in one. Except for in motels because I'm pretty sure the dog would test if she could dig through door to follow us out. Walks without me? Must have forgotten I'll just catch up!

Site woes are something we all get unless we always park on paved drive through sites and what fun would that be. Never getting to show off our skills backing in late at night. While kicking ourselves for not running the trailer plug accessory line to the back up lights so we could put a fog light on trailer back bumper. One would think 25 years of backing in as a team would yield flawless team work but after driving a long ways in the dark that skill is often found to have vanished. Along with the location of the bright flashlight with the fresh batteries (rolled under seat, then burrowed down in stuff stored there).

Yes indeed I think there are many here who can totally relate to that. Just wait grand kids go from diaper changes to flipping any and all switches they can find. Makes for some interesting and unexpected power draws. Turns out that the RV dump station didn't stink that was me. End results of switching engine charging to the battery that had a cell found to be shorted just before we left. "no problem we won't need that reserve battery for this trip, it's getting late, lets go, I'll deal with it when we get back" Which I did, replacing the melted wire and circuit breaker that I'm pretty sure did all it was ever going to do in the drive from our site to the dump station line.

We camp because of the adventure right? So let us all share the adventure and moment of silence for the poor starving bats. I think after reading the informative OP we need a research project to determine if diesel fumes repel bats. If that guy lived there maybe the diesel fumes where what saved him from being bled white or becoming a vampire.

[Iowa Dave]

We had a large tent trailer camper, a called a fold-down around these parts and a pop-up in others. It was a Venture and was very well built and overall gave me very few problems for the 22 years we owned it.
My wife and I became pretty adept at setting it up and when we took the three kids with us, and they all had tasks, however menial, we got pretty fast.

We arrived at a Corps of Engineers campground in South Dakota just as a nice thunderstorm was approaching from the west, as in every trip I’ve ever made to South Dakota. I backed into our site, told everyone this needed to be done quickly, and went to work. Just across the road was a stick built camper facing us and with the door side facing west towards the large Missouri River reservoir. I could see the rain on the other side of the lake. About that time, one of the people in the camper said loudly “better get out here honey, this is going to be good”. And his wife came out and plopped down in her chaise lounge.
We snapped, cranked, flipped, zipped, installed the bed supports and all the rest of the things you do when setting up the rolling erector set. It only took a few minutes and into the camper we went. We had the solid fabric side windows on the road side zipped down and the rest of them zipped up. The clear vinyl windows on the road side gave us a good view of folks across the road who had anticipated our epic setup failure. We also had a good view of their camper as it encountered the arrival of the 40 mile an hour squall line which flipped their awning up and over the top of their camper.
And I said “Hey honey, watch this, this ought to be good.”

After the storm subsided, the neighbors picked up the pieces, put the destroyed awning in the pickup box, examined the abrasions the chaise lounges had made in the side of their rig and left. We enjoyed a nice South Dakota sunset.
“Batten down the hatches”. may be a nautical term but it’s appropriate for land yachts too. And you gotta take care of your own before you plan on enjoying someone else’s problems.
Iowa Dave