Camping, Part 2

(Part 1)
How much does Andy love Alton? Enough to ride in the backseat of his truck for three hours on the way to and from camping. Luckily, Andy is thin and does not have claustrophobia or motion sickness. We did this same auto configuration once before on the way to camping, but Chris was driving his Tundra, I was in the front seat, and Andy and Minerva were in the backseat. As we neared the campgrounds, Chris opened the tiny rear window and we pulled up next to Charlie and Jesse and their dog Mac, at which point Minerva went nuts, jumped out the rear window, scrabbled over everything in the bed of the truck and landed on the ground. That will WAKE YOU up.
Anyhoo, Andy has a Dakota, not a Tundra, so the backseat is smaller and more cramped, and made even more so by Alton's ginormous car seat taking up the front passenger seat (with airbag turned off). Minerva got her scrap of seat behind Katie, the driver, and we were off. I had noticed online that sunset was supposed to be at 7:59pm that night, and was trying hard to make it to the campsite before it got completely dark. We pulled in at around 8:03 and scrambled to start figuring out what was where before we lost all light. Andy pulled out tarps and hammer and began setting up the brand-new, never-been-put-up-before behemoth tent with only the light from his headlights. Minerva stood guard in the truck while I rummaged through our duffel bag and began layering clothing on top of our shorts-sportin' summer baby because it was getting a little cold to be standing around outside.
**Auntie May Disclaimer: from this point on, Alton was wearing a hat on his head for the entire duration of the camping trip.**

I popped him into the Ergo frontpack carrier so that we would have the additional ease of body heat, and did my best to help Andy with the tent, holding a pole here, a pole there, and running the rainfly over the top. I had thrown two fleece feetie sleepy suits in for Alton, but when I put the smaller of the two suits on and managed to zip it up, Altie whimpered when he found that the suit was so small he couldn't raise his arms up! He looked like a fuzzy, green flightless bird. So his clothing got re-layered and rearranged and Andy held him while I set up the sleeping pads and bags in the tent. The original plan of Alton sleeping on a comforter was abandoned in favor of a much warmer big 'ol family bag. We got everything unloaded from the truck (Alexa and Brian were arriving in the morning) and were finally able to crash.
We got a nice early camping start and Andy took Minerva for a little walk and went to give her her breakfast when he noticed that her food was missing! In the absence of bear boxes at the campsite, we figured that food thievery must not be much of a problem and put our large coolers and rubbermaid boxes of food underneath the picnic table of the site. Minerva's food was in a big ziploc bag with her plastic measuring cup inside of the smallest rubbermaid box on the top of the pile. Andy found the muddied rubbermaid box with Minerva's dog dish still in it tossed in some bushes next to our site, but the dog food was nowhere to be found. Kids? Punks? Drunks? Andy told me the long and short of the situation and I saw red while I changed the baby's diaper, all the while mentally boiling in oil the jerks who thought it would be funny to steal from someone else's campsite and throw away food for a dog. As many of you know, we don't feed Minerva "people" food, and 6:30 in the morning was not about the time to start by giving her a breakfast of Costco muffins and diet coke, so Andy drove into town (which was literally about 2 miles away--this was not a country/mountain campsite) and bought some dog food for the poor hungry pooch. I did some investigative work and found that the mud caked all over the rubbermaid box had been hiding some deep scratches and gouges all over the side, and the ziploc bag containing the food was under a nearby tree with holes torn in it and the measuring cup still inside, even though every single scrap of kibble was gone. Not goons, RACCOONS! We were impressed that the little bandits had managed to open the plastic box (it was one of those kind with the clicky handles on the sides, very secure) and that they had the chutzpah to steal Minerva's food right from under her nose when the whole campsite smelled like dog. Little did we know that these were streetwise raccoons, accustomed to car campers and bold enough to charge into any campsite regardless of how many dogs there were. From then on we kept the food locked in the trucks at night since bears were apparently not a problem (although ask Pam and Steve for a story about bears going for coolers in the car next time you see them), but those 'coons didn't give up. They visited us each night (never got anything after that first night), even going as far as to come to the campsite on Sunday night while Alexa and Brian were still up and sitting around the campfire! Brian saw them and made a few assertive, dog-whisperer-style "cccchhhhh!" noises and they went away, although Alexa didn't see the raccoons and thought that her new husband was having some sort of fit.
Soon after the morning dogfood shenanigans on Saturday morning, Alexa and Brian arrived and the fun could begin. They brought their two-man kayak and Lake Sylvia beckoned her chilly ripples for us to paddle around. We enjoyed a short hike and Brian saved a fish! We were cruising on a path overlooking the shoreline and Brian spotted a very large salmon in the water, lying near the surface on its side and plaintively popping its mouth open and shut. Benevolent woodsman that he is, he crept as close as he could to the waterline (there was no real shoreline here--the hiking trail was above the water at least six feet with a pretty crumbly cliff edge leading down to it) and got a big stick and gently turned the shiny, scaly beast over. We cheered as the fish righted himself, then slowly eased back onto his side and resumed his bobbing mouth. Sick...old...a goner, we pronounced, and Brian offered to catch it for dinner and scale it with a butter knife. Something in the fishy's eye made a connection with Brian (nicknamed Dr Doolittle for the duration of our hike) and he prodded further with his stick, clearing out some low brush and making a better path for the fish to swim. A few moments later, Brian's stick came up out of the water with some fishing line tangled on the end of it! Aha! He wasn't a sick fish, he was all tangled up in the line! The fish gave an athletic stroke of his tail and, I kid you not, jumped out of the water to thank Brian for doing him this kindness before swimming away. I considered asking the fish for a few wishes, but based on what happened to those Grimm boys, I decided not to. After the hike, Alton had some naps, the kayak was taken out a few times and we enjoyed a cheese & cracker appetizer hour while B&A told us about their honeymoon road trip to Olympic Peninsula B&Bs (including a trip to Forks, which we discovered is the site of the Twilight books! Guess we'll have to make a trip to the library for those!). We had burgers, cupcakes and s'mores and the evening passed without incident.
Sunday we took our sweet time getting in gear. We made breakfast, and hung out by the fire (the tall trees covering the sun made it chilly enough for a campfire just about any time of day), Andy and Brian tossed around a frisbee and football, and Minerva decided to go for a swim, charging and belly flopping into the water like she's some kind of Labrador or something. She was impressing the pants off of a little boy and his dog, who was a border collie extremely reluctant to get in the cold water and fetch anything. The little boy was a sort of mascot of Lake Sylvia--he had a razor scooter and was motoring around the whole campgrounds talking to eeeeeeeveryone. We suspected that whenever his parents needed a break to cook dinner, break down the tent, or just rest their eardrums, they told Chatty Chatterson to "just ride around and talk to people." We called him Scooter Boy, or Scooter for short, and cracked up listening to his conversations with other campers. "I'm six." "Oh, you are, are you? Are you sure you're not sixty, little boy?" "I'm NOT sixty, YOU'RE sixty. I can tell by your mustache!" Scooter took a particular shine to Brian and regaled him with stories like how his dad likes to cook meat and them give him the fat from it. Ooooo-kay.
Sunday we also had a downpour! Even though the weather report said that it would only be partly cloudy, no rain, we had some clouds and thunder rolling in over the afternoon that galvanized us to put stuff (like firewood!) under cover and take a final trip to the bathroom just before the skies opened up for about an hour. We amused ourselves in the ginormous tent playing 20 questions and charades (thank goodness for the big tent!) before the rain ended and we amused ourselves by looking at how much stuff the people at the neighboring campsite had left out (and was now waterlogged) before taking off for the entire day. tee hee, we're mean. With our dry wood we started a nice crackly fire in the firepit and roasted hot dogs, ate cupcakes for Andy's birthday, and polished off a few more s'mores.
All in all, it was a cold but very fun trip and we arrived home dirty and exhausted, just like every other camping trip. All three of us (not Nerve) took a turn in the huge soaking tub in our master bathroom and the following day we celebrating Andy's actual birthdate like rock stars, with pizza and champagne. A great start to September.