Camping, Part 1

So for this year's Labor Day weekend, Andy was going to be celebrating a big birthday (30!) so a trip was definitely in order. But where to go? A long weekend is certainly not a time to buy a pricey plane ticket anywhere, and I didn't get my act in gear until June to plan the trip, which meant that many places would be booked up already, anyway. Our first camping trip in the Pacific Northwest was the selection, and with their wedding (and mounting wedding stress) several months away, I was able to get Alexa and Brian, our Seattle friends, to agree to go on a long weekend camping trip the weekend after their nuptial date. (To their credit, I don't think they regretted it...or at least they didn't act like they did!) With nearly the whole state of Washington between our two homes to choose from, we selected a campsite based on two all-important factors: 1) a lake for swimming and 2) availability for the long weekend. We came up with Lake Sylvia state recreation area, a small freshwater loch west of Olympia in the town of Montesano (which I insisted on pronouncing with an Italian accent: Monte-SAH-no...seriously, within a state of unpronounceable Native American names, where did this name come from?), about a three hour drive for us and a two hour drive for them. Another "must" for the trip was that WA state parks allow dogs in their campgrounds, because I rightly assumed that after a few summer trips to CA and the big wedding weekend, we would be broke from paying exorbitant kennel nightly boarding fees for the Nerve (and broke from taking her to the vet when she got kennel cough afterward, blah) and want to bring her along. Plus, she likes to camp.
One of the crucial background details I must insert here is that Brian and Alexa (B&A) and we have very diverse camping experiences that we are bringing to the table. B&A are kind of like an REI poster couple. She was in Girl Scouts, he was in Boy Scouts. Mr and Mrs Hardcore Woodsman. They are backpacking campers, which means they own all that really cool camping gear that can all squish down into one tiny bag that you carry on your back for miles and miles before you set up camp, kill your own food, purify your own water, and use your boot as a pillow for the night. (Ok, I made up some of that but NOT the part about the boot. Brian says he did that. Alexa says that it must have been before he met her. The girl will go without a shower while out in nature but not so far as to use footwear as a headrest.) Their sleeping bags are rated down to at least 20 degrees, their therm-a-rest sleeping pads can fold up to the size of a paper towel roll, and Brian has a stove that's smaller than a Venti Starbucks latte. They are rugged mountain people.
We, on the other hand, are light packers when it comes to everything but camping. We are car campers. In California we had a regular camping crew with Chris & Brian, Charlie & Jesse, Peg & Bobbie, et al, and routinely that meant bringing at least four carloads of stuff, maybe five. Plus, we needed cars to tow our boats. No, that's not a typo; I said boats, plural. Our last trip to Glory Hole Campgrounds last year involved three cars, two dogs, a powerboat, a dinghy, and a two-man kayak. Which was perfect: a powerboat for the testosteroney boys to go wakeboarding/waterskiing, a gentle dinghy for Captain Charlie and her Chief Mate Preggers Katie, and a kayak for the dogs.
It's not so much that we couldn't have packed any lighter, it was just that with everyone's different schedules we were usually staggering our arrivals to the campsites in different vehicles, so you might as well fill up said vehicles with stuff, right? That's the kind of rationalization we were looking for, anyway, with our taste for morning campsite mimosas, eggs and french toast courtesy of Chef Chris, habit of appetizering the day away with fixin's by Peg and Bobbie, savoring dinner of pasta salad, special recipe of yours truly and, once, a deep-fried-organically-farmed turkey from Charlie. We weren't really so much camping as much as we were spending the weekend at a bed and breakfast that happened to have been turned inside out. But that's how we liked it, with 75% of our calories coming from carbs.
This was even streamlined down from our first year, in which we had planned a hearty breakfast fit for a starving longshoreman, a lunch that an army of schoolkids would have trouble with, and dinner of bleu cheese burgers, daiquiris and s'mores. From then on we cut out the lunch and feasted through the afternoon on homemade pepper jelly over cream cheese on crackers from Peg and Bobbie. If you've never tried it, I highly recommend it. P&B have gotten car camping down to such an exact science that their "camping box" spawned at least two copycats from within our group: running out to Target to purchase a rubbermaid storage box and fill it with the camping essentials so that on a moment's notice you can throw the box in the back of the truck (along with your tent, sleeping bags, chairs, pads, coolers and, in Bobbie's case, parasol) and hit the highway. They became such camping goddesses to us that they were known as WWPBD: What Would Peg and Bobbie Do? When we were stuck with such scenarios as whether to throw away the grungy hair tie that we found on the picnic table of our campsite, we said WWPBD and realized that the Wisconsin sisters would turn that hair tie into a clothesline, nay, into a shower hung from a tree with just a mere flick of the wrist. "Leave the campsite nicer than the way you found it" was their motto. They grew up on a dairy farm: they recycled before it was cool and taught MacGyver everything he knows.
The other key thing to note in our camping past is that we always camped in NorCal, i.e., where it was HOT. In 2006 we camped over what was literally the hottest weekend of the entire summer, and it was around the mid-90s in the middle of the night. People were creeping from their sleeping bags to go jump in the lake. Andy and I, who had feared that we would spend the weekend in our teeny tent shoving a suffocatingly hot Minerva off of our air mattress (yes, we used to camp with an air mattress until last year), found that she was thrun out in a corner of the tent, as far as she could get from us, panting all night long. The heat meant that we always chose our campsites based on awesome car camping and a lake that allowed boats, swimming, and dogs. California mountain sunshine beat down on our shoulders as we sat in the lake, buoyed by a life jacket and clutching a slippery tow line as we shrieked "hit it!" to whomever was driving the boat.
With this thusly-described camping experience under our belts, Andy and I prepared for our first camping trip up in the PNW and our first camping trip with baby. In Hillsboro the regulation summer lasts from July 4th to Labor Day (ok, maybe a few days longer than that since it will be in the 80s this weekend), so for the last two months it's been in the high 70s and low 80s with maybe 3 days of rain in there somewhere. So for some reason, reading weather.com's prediction that our campsite at Lake Sylvia would be getting highs in the mid 60s and lows in the high 40s didn't sink in, and we blithely began packing as if we were spending the weekend on our front porch in sunny Hillsboro. We threw in a couple of fleece jammies and a sweatsuit for Altie, saying, "ah, sure, he can just sleep between us on a comforter! If it gets cold we'll put a hat on him." We had been flipping and flopping about buying a bigger tent (our tried-and-true tent was busting at its seams with a queen-size air mattress in it, let alone two people, their clothes, a dog and a baby) and decided we could squeeze together for one more season. The tent, however, had different ideas and a pole busted when Andy started putting it together at home for a trial run, so a new tent had to be purchased. We decided to go with a tent that we would "grow" into, so we got a behemoth big enough for us to do jumping jacks in, host a cattle call for A C horus Line in, and give Minerva her own boudoir in.
This year we also came ready with our own stove, a foam puzzle floor for baby to play on, and all the meal food. Strangely, the truck was less full than it had ever been on a previous camping trip. Including the trip where we forgot the duffel bag full of our clothes and toiletries and had to leg it to the nearest podunk town in search of a store, gnawing our fingernails as we passed convenience stores that sold garments that included oversized t-shirts screened with an image of a cartoon bikini-clad body over your body. I've never been so happy to see Wal-Mart. So laden, we set out for Lake Sylvia...to be continued. (Part 2)