Memorial Day camping adventures!

Original post date: 29 May 2008

One great thing about working at Raytheon are the holidays - we get paid holidays for Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas to New Years. So we got Monday off, and since Raytheon also does flex time, we could pile up our work earlier in the week and we took Friday off, too. Hooray for four day weekends!!!

We've been talking about going camping for a long time now - there were even discussions about a Valentine's Day camping trip up in the woods, which would have been insanely cold. And snowy. Glad we didn't do that! Camping in May, it turned out, was cold enough. We were planning on going high up into the southern Sierra Nevadas, but when we heard that the place where we were intending to camp got snow earlier in the week, we decided to camp at a lower altitude.

We drove up there on Friday and found our perfect spot. Most spots that we passed along the way were basically glorified parking lots or turnoffs of the highway, with lots of tents crammed in. It's not really camping if you're in a parking lot within five feet of the highway. So we drove on, determined to have a good, at least somewhat private camping site. We found one way off the highway, down a poorly-maintained, pot-hole-laced dirt road that my car could barely handle and only the most insane people would ever consider taking an RV down - although plenty of people did. We set up camp and had a weinie roast and made smores and it was fabulous. The camp site was much more spartan than I'd anticipated - there were no pre-set camping sites, you just came and set up and claimed that spot, there were none of the trappings of the camping sites that I'm used to - picnic tables, fire pits with grills, bathrooms, not even a spigot somewhere that would give you drinking water.

So it was a bit more "roughing it" than I was used to. We even had to dig potty pits in the bushes. That was fun. And definitely a first for me!! James was an absolute dear and dug mine for me. That's love!Saturday, our first full day camping, we woke up freezing cold at 5:30 am and it felt remarkably like a sleepover, with us bundled down deep in our sleeping bags and giggling and talking and stuff. We didn't get much sleep either night due to the cold and the noisy neighbors (camping etiquette sure has changed lately! Since when do people bring stereos and blast music and party all night long?) and the especially the deep cold - I had dreams about snow! We talked about getting up and having a little parade through the campsite, banging pots and pans, to greet the day for all the hung-over partiers. But we thought we might come back at the end of the day to find our tent burnt down, so we got up and made breakfast instead (pancakes and eggs taste better outside!).

We went first to see Camp Whitsett, where James worked for two summers as a camp leader. He was in charge of the cope course, one of those scary rope courses that's strung up on telephone poles and you have to get from one pole to the other. From there, we hiked to the top of Sentinel Peak. It was about a 1000 foot climb in elevation. It took us a couple hours to get to the top, and it was a lot of fun and pretty and full of fresh air and nature and all that good stuff. There was one scary part, where we had to cross a sheer rocky face when one small mis-step could send you tumbling a pretty far way down. But we made it through and at the top we had a picnic lunch. It was getting pretty cold up there, so we didn't linger too long before we began the long hike back down.

That night we were too tired to cook dinner back at camp, so we went to a steak house on our way back out from semi-civilization to middle-of-nowhere, where our camp was. We got to the steakhouse an hour and a half before it opened, and we were so exhausted that we just fell asleep in the car until it was time to eat. That night back at camp, we made a roaring fire and roasted more marshmallows. We got invited by a few people to join them in their partying, but we stayed in our spot, being old fashioned and cute. That night before bed, we did take a walk through the rest of the camp site, and we got invited in to join a group where the men were singing and passing around a guitar. After some gentle prodding, James got up and sang a song that's very special to us. And I just sat in my chair and melted.

The next day, we made breakfast amid some mild rainfall, then ate said breakfast cozied up under the overhang of our tent. When the rain stopped, we packed up camp and headed to Porterville to stay with his parents for the night. It was nice to visit them -- and show them the ring! And it was amazing to take a shower and not have to squat over a dirt hole to pee, I'll tell you.