Mud

Last weekend was Josh and my first camping trip.  We were going to a wedding of a college friend on Sunday and decided to camp near the wedding in Battle Creek.  We looked at the weather and by the time we left, there was practically no chance of rain.  Wrong.

We got to the campground and found our site, which was a bit smaller than we imagined.  Josh's mom had let us borrow a screened in porch kind of tent that was 12x20!  That's huge!  It was a bear to get up, too, with just the two of us trying to put together 6 poles and raise the tent in sync.  It took a good hour and some frustration on my part, hah!  Finally we got the big tent up and then we put our picnic table and real tent under it :)  That was the easy part.  All was well for the night except that it was about 80 degrees and 80 % humidity all night.  We were so hot that we used a big window fan (which was blowing right on Josh's face because our tent is small) and by the middle of the night we were freezing!!

The next morning went well until the grease fire at breakfast.  Let's just say that our bacon was charred and we will no longer be using high flames when cooking grease over a fire, hahaha!  Supposedly coals are better.  We were really excited about the coffee pot percolator thing that my parents had given us.  I got out the creamer poured a cup of coffee and it only made a 1/2 cup of coffee!  For both of us!  It tasted like plastic (because I had the coffee grounds in plastic bags to save space) and a spoonful of grounds with the coffee poured nicely into my mug.  Ooops, must have done something wrong!  So off we went to the coffee shop in town (20 minutes away).  It was really good coffee :)

That afternoon we went kayaking, which was very fun!  The lady at the boat rental warned us that there could be storms that afternoon.  We weren't concerned.   After we got back from our trip around the island in the kayak it started to thunder.  It thundered around for a long time and then it started to sprinkle.  The lady next store was just setting up her tent, so we offered to help her since it was about to rain.  Josh had no longer said, "I don't think it'll be a big storm or anything...." when it started to pour.  Though it only poured for 20 minutes, we laughed as the water began filling our campsite.  We kept thinking it would stop any minute.  It didn't.  We stood on top of the table as the water pooled inside our big tent and then under the small one.  I know this sounds like an exaggeration but it's not.  Our entire campsite was 2 inches under water!  I sloshed through to the real tent to see if our sheets and stuff were getting wet.  Surprisingly, even though I could feel all the water under the tent, nothing inside got wet!!  After all of this, we were considering going to Josh's mom's house to spend the night.  BUT, after 30 minutes, all the water had receded!  We spent the night comfortably.  UNTIL, we heard scratch, scratch, scratch, in the middle of the night.  We had left two bagged bagels on top of the picnic table, under the zipped tent!  A raccoon stole our breakfast!  So off to the coffee shop we went again before taking everything down and going to the wedding.

It was an adventure for sure!  We were planning on camping quite a few times over the summer but now we're thinking the family reunion campout my be enough for this summer, hahaha.  Too much work and you can't depend on the weather!  Overall it was fun though.  We got in some relaxation and had an experience!  Funny memories!