CAMPING: PART ONE

Friday morning I woke up, already thinking about how many reasons I could feasibly come up with to back out of this camping trip without A) offending and disappointing my friends and B)without looking like the biggest, whiniest, spineless tool known to humankind. See, this is how I think in my head....when things happen in my life, they are always of astronomical proportions!! HUMANKIND would be affected by my bailing out of camping.

I'm watching the weather channel, groaning every time I saw that stupid image of the cloud with the lighting bolt shooting from it like a death dagger. 60% chance of thunderstorms for the day. And I'm going camping. I can't even tell Jeff that I don't want to go because he's already done the very nice, "man loves his woman" thing, by getting a nice tent and a very sturdy queen size air mattress that sits on its very own frame.

So, it's 9 in the morning and I'm sitting on my bed, putting my clothes together and I am trying to keep track of all of the tips my friends have been giving me to make this trip a tolerable one. Make sure I have a tarp to cover the tent, don't touch the tent walls because it draws water in, keep my eye open for the bobcats (that was almost the deal breaker), bring bug repellent,....

The plan is to meet my friends Sarah and Larry and we are going to stake our claim on some good camping land. We have to meet early so that we have first dibs. Well, already I knew that they had a completely different idea of what early was because I would have been there at the crack of dawn. Sarah and I didn't get there until 11:30. Larry was nowhere to be found.

OK, so as Sarah and I are driving to the site, I mention to her that my friend, who happens to be a very seasoned camper informed me that we probably should have made reservations. Well, I must have grown a bellybutton on my forehead because she gave me this look of "Seriously, though, what's the matter with you?!!" She scoffs and says, "We do NOT need to make a reservation. We're camping, not getting a room at the Hilton!". I just shrug my shoulders. What do I know? I can only repeat what I hear, right?

So, like I said before, we get there at 11:30 and as we're driving though this very quaint, non intimidating area, my heart starts to pound a little faster, but with excitement and not fear. Hmmm....interesting. I'm looking at all of these tidy little sites with their own picnic tables and I'm thinking to myself, "we have the pick of the day. These sites are all empty", until I read what the signs on the posts say: OCCUPIED.

Post after post after post says that the site is occupied. I look over at Sarah, who now has a worried look on her face. Playing dumb, I say, "What does that mean?" OK, my parents paid two grand a year for me to go to private school for nine years. I better know what the word "OCCUPIED" means. But I'm being a bit of a pretentious turd and I'm curious how she's going to answer.

"I guess that we need reservations", she says. Eureka!! Ding, ding, ding! We've got a brain in our midst! Of course we need a reservation, you wingnut! So I get out of the car to read the sign for camp regulations and I am informed that usually reservations are made, and THEN people can come and camp on the UNreserved sites. We made a mad dash back to the car and found the last two remaining sites that were not occupied. We parked the car at one site and ran to the other site, making sure that any potential site snatcher would know they were too late. Sarah and I had saved the day for our group of friends. Come hell or highwater, we were going camping..............................

-T