camping Vol. I

Hey friends. This past weekend, well Saturday and part of Sunday, really, my dear friend and old roommate (KATE...Ms. Crampton, if you're nasty...) Hit the road for a mini backpacking adventure. To the right is a picture of me attempting to look a little bad ass....we stayed at site B7, which WAS bad ass!

Anyhow, Kate and I hit it to Lake Maria State Park. This state park has a few "group" sites and the rest are all hike-in sites. It has been a LOOOONG time since I have done any hiking in, and this place sounded great. So we each brought our respected camping items, got food together on the way (more to come on that) and got out of the city as soon as we could.

Once we arrive and made whiskey drinks in our travelling flasks, threw our packs on, grabbed our 2 bundles of fire wood, and hit the trail.

Kate and I lived together back in the giant Uptown house (3120!) We lived in a house of 6 people-3 guys and 3 girls. The house was huge, as were the many memories that came out of it. That includes our "weekend" road trip to Mardi Gras when we did in fact sleep in my Aerostar van in a parking garage for 3 nights....but that's a whole nother story!

Anyhow, Kate went to Law School, I started working with the kids, and we both got busy. But every so often something like this will come up and we cannot resist the idea of having a night to catch up.

The hike in only took about 25 minutes or so. We arrived at the B7 sign and hiked in a bit. We saw really nice pit toilets and more trail. After going down a hill, seeing prairie all around, and then a little "island" spot, I knew we made it to our site. We really were up on a hill-like island surround by prairie. It was pretty beautiful!

I really love camping. I love figuring out where to put the tent, and what to cook, and what supplies you will need, and all of it. So we spent some time setting up (and continued to drink whiskey) and decided to take a hike. We put a little sack together with our food, had our drinks, water, smokes, and a pocket knife (just in case :) ) and hiked on.


As we made our way out of the woods and on top of a plateau type thing, we got to really see some colors. It was pretty nice. This was about the time when I started telling Kate about one of my new favorite TV shows Celebrity Ghost Stories. This show is RAD (another side note...look into it) Anyhow, We also found a board walk and took that to where we would eventually eat our lunch from the hobo sack. We chatted for a long time, and enjoyed the great outdoors.



After sitting for a bit, I realized I had a good whiskey buzz going on....I think Kate did too, so we decided to head back to camp. Again we chatted about ghost stories and enjoyed the fall colors.

Once we got back to camp, we had to look for some kindling and get the fire going. I gladly took that on and had a fire going in no time. We had no clock, which was really nice. Everything was decided based on the sun, or how we felt. So we talked about old trips and fun times we had had in the past. And we spent a good amount of time talking about what the future may hold-both for us individually, and as a unit (Kate is moving out to Colorado very soon to pursuit the Kate Crampton, attorney at Law thing.) And what that really means is a fun trip out west to go visit.

****More to come this afternoon/evening.*****