I figured that I have not posted on here in a while so I thought I would share our first ever family camping trip adventure we had this past weekend. Let me first start by saying that yes I am a big princess when it comes to being clean so this was a challenge for me but it was my idea to do this in the first place.
Day One-Friday
The Plan: Be on the road by 5pm, traveling approximately 2.5 hours to campsite, have about 30-40 minutes of daylight to set up site, eat and enjoy the night.
The Facts: Left the house at 6pm, traveled nearly 3 hours due to traffic, had no daylight to set up site, did not eat and did not enjoy the night.
The story: As with all of our family trips we are NEVER on time so why I thought we would be this time is beyond me. I guess I have high hopes that for once we will get it right but obviously this was not the weekend for that. We are on the road for maybe 30 minutes and we hit construction and a complete standstill. Okay keep thinking positive if we sit here for this amount of time and go about 5 miles over the speed limit we will be fine....WRONG! Traffic was longer than expected and potty breaks were more than usual so the time quickly passed us by. Our plan was to go to Turkey Run but they were full so we decided to stay a half mile down the road at Cherokee Valley Campgrounds. I of course wanted to see how rough we could handle it and asked for no electric, no water and the most remote primitive lot they had. We arrived just a half hour shy of the place closing for the night and checked ourselves in. It is now completely dark and the lady did not exactly give us the best directions to our site so we nearly ran over a whole group of Amish kids trying to find out way to it. We pull up to our site and she was not kidding when she gave us primitive. We were the last site on the edge of huge ravine that dropped off and was covered in trees. We park the car just right with the brights on so we can see what we are doing and pull out the tent. We have never put this tent together in our lives so we all take a corner and lay it out on the only flat section of our site without rolling down the ravine and killing ourselves. After about an hour of redo this and go find that the darn thing is finally up. We all needed to use the restroom so we started walking. Now here is where I will tell you that this girl does not do outhouses and is not good with public bathrooms but I was prepared for what I thought would be the worst. With our site being so far in the back they had outhouses about two minutes from our site....let me think um no so we keep walking. We then approach a cute little red bathroom area about five minutes from our site and walk up. I will not disgust you with the details but if this was supposed to be an upgrade from the outhouse they were way off...so we keep walking. We are now nearly a half mile from our campsite and this little white building says Shower house. We are all now seriously wondering what kind of mess we had gotten ourselves into as we approach. First off the shower house has three stalls and three shower stalls for nearly 60-70 campsites...hmm do you see something wrong with this picture? Second they were so run down and nasty you can't even imagine. The toilets were fairly clean but everything around them was not. Heather decided to see what was in store for us shower wise and oh my it was so disgusting. We all finish up and head back to our sites thinking about how not fun this will be in the morning and praying no one needs to go to the bathroom during the night. It is now midnight and we were not about to start a fire so we pulled out what we needed and decided to have a snack before going to bed. Christopher decides he wants milk and oreos so I pour him, Heather and Steven a glass and just as soon as I do Steven drops the lantern and dumps it all over the tent. Now this just adds to the already wonderful moods we are all in as we scramble around in the dark trying to put the lantern back together. Okay lantern is back together, milk cleaned up and we sit and have a snack. We are all so irritated by this point that we decide to go to bed. I have never in my life suffered from insomnia but tonight was the night for me. I am not sure if it was the fact that we were freezing to death, the air mattress was rapidly deflating from the cold, the very loud drunks on the other side of the campground, the rain falling all night long, or just the complete fear of what have I gotten myself into but I could not sleep at all. I literally laid there and stared at the ceiling of the tent all night counting about 10,000 sheep forwards and backwards with no luck. I have no idea the time I just know we laid down around 1am and I am thinking it is probably 3am when I hear a lady start screaming at her kid to shut up and go back to sleep and say it is 5am and it is too early for her to be awake. I am now thinking I have laid here looking at the top of the tent for 4 hours. I finally doze off about 2o minutes later and wake up to some guy yelling good morning to his buddies and it is now 7am......it is going to be a long weekend.
Day Two-Saturday
The Plan: Shower, Cook Breakfast, Go on a Canoe trip, Relax at Campsite
The Story: After being rudely awakened by the screaming man I now needed to make the forever long hike to the restrooms. Heather was now awake and we decide we would beat the rush of girls to shower so we grabbed our gear and off we went. We came up to the shower house and there it was a line of girls waiting to shower...AHHH. We joined the line and were rather amazed at how many women really think they need to look beautiful while camping...hello people we are in the middle of nowhere, there is no one to impress but the bugs laying on the ground beside you so what is the point really. After waiting for three very nice but very vain Amish girls to get all showered, dressed and primped Heather gets into the first shower stall and turns and looks at me with this pray for me look of terror on her face. We both had a plan of how to shower properly which included DO NOT take off your crocs, DO NOT touch the walls or the shower curtain, get in and get out. Let me say that crocs have always been my favorite but after seeing these showers they are now my new trusty sidekicks. I hurried through my shower making sure that none of the nasty water came anywhere near my mouth, dried off and got dressed. We both were excited to be done and back at our site. My husband and Christopher had a nice fire going so we all started to make breakfast. We had bacon, eggs and toast and after cleaning up and the guys showering got ready for our canoe trip. Steven & Chris shared one canoe and Heather & I in another. Steven & Chris's canoe seemed to have an issue with staying straight because they spent the entire trip spinning around in circles, under big rocks and going sideways while slamming into several other canoes. One canoe guy asked them if they were doing the bmx xtreme version of canoeing....Heather & I pretended we did not know them and kept on going. We finally finished our trip and pulled up to the sand bar to unload and now these guides expect Heather & I to carry this heavy thing up a big set of stairs so they can load it. We stumble and nearly break out necks getting it up the stairs but we made it. Canoe trip successful and fun. We stopped at a little place called the Hole in the Wall to grab something to eat because we were starving and by the name of the place it did not sound promising. We were however very impressed with the food and thought it should be submitted to the show Diners, Drive ins and Dives (this being the dive) as it was very good food. We spent the rest of the day at the campsite playing games, relaxing, making hotdogs for dinner and smores for dessert and hit the sack around midnight. I actually slept most of the night but was ever so rudely awaken by three drunks fighting over on another end of the grounds. I seem to recall a sign saying quiet hours from 11-7 or you will be asked to leave but I guess us primitive folks were exempt from these rules. They finished their fight and I went back to sleep for a bit...up again at 8am.
Day Three-Sunday
The Plan: Showers, Breakfast, Pack up the truck and Hiking at Turkey Run before heading home.
The Story: We went and completed our "wonderful" showers and were surprised to be the first ones there this morning. After showering Heather & I made breakfast while the guys showered and nearly burned down the whole forest with our bacon grease fire. Why are guys so much better at fires than girls? We finished breakfast just as the guys were walking back to the site and ate a somewhat burnt breakfast. We cleaned everything up and loaded the truck. We drove to Turkey Run State Park, grabbed a map, used the very clean restrooms, grabbed water and took off on our hiking adventure. Turkey Run has I think 12 hiking trails in all that are graded on the map by level of difficulty from moderate to very rugged with miles totally around 15 when you complete them all. Well as many of you know I am trying to lose weight so I say lets do them all knowing we would not have time but then we settled on doing only the ones that were rugged to very rugged for the most fun and exercise. We started at trail 3 which was listed as very rugged and heard people talking that this was supposed to be the hardest of all of them. We hiked through big boulders, down into these huge vallies and up this big huge rocks and yeah we were impressed but did not think it was that big of a deal (note we were still full of energy at this point). We kept going on 3 other trails listed as rugged and although we were getting tired, legs were hurting we decided to take the last trail that was listed as very rugged. Whomever told those poor people on trail three that it was the hardest had obviously not been on trail 9. The trail started with three sets of ladders you had to climb down to get way down inside these huge rocks. I for one hate ladders so this was not fun for me but I faced my fears and went down them shaking legs and all. We hike out and ended up at the "punch bowl" which is basically a hole full of water looked at that and had to turn around and go back up the ladders to get out. You then continue on down tons of stairs back into the bottom of all the rocks and there we see it. The continuous line up the rocks of 140 stairs. Now these are not just any stairs there are very steep and sometimes a huge step up and at this point we are all so exhausted that I think we could have nearly cried when we saw them. So up we go huffing and puffing the whole way. After about two breaks we reached the top and sat down to try and regain our composure and get back into a normal breathing pattern before we passed out. We decided that we had hiked enough and planned our trip out of this place now renamed "hell on earth" and off we hiked. The trip out seemed much longer than we had hoped and ended up being nothing but stairs up and down the whole way but we finally made it out and could barely stand on our feet at the end. We were filthy, exhausted, hungry and thirsty. All in all we hiked for about 4 hours and covered between 6-7 miles of this enormous park. We grabbed lunch and started the trip home. Steven nearly fell asleep while driving so I took over and drove the rest of the way home. We unpacked the car, took showers, guys ate something small and Heather & I crashed.
Needless to say I am very sore today and extremely tired but we did have alot of fun. We plan to make camping a regular thing as it is nice to get away from it all. No phones, no tv and just enjoy nature. We will however not be staying at the same place next time as I cannot handle another trip in those bathrooms. I am happy to say I lost three pounds while we were gone so that was good. I will say that even though I am sore I would go hiking again today as it was alot of fun. Next time we want to stay at Turkey Run...they seem to know how to keep things clean. :)
