{"id":1928,"date":"2009-07-12T21:41:30","date_gmt":"2009-07-13T04:41:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/randomandodd.com\/?p=1928"},"modified":"2009-07-12T23:06:58","modified_gmt":"2009-07-13T06:06:58","slug":"1928","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/randomandodd.com\/?p=1928","title":{"rendered":"Camping Trip 09"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Camping<\/a>\"Camping<\/a>\"Camping
\n<\/a>
\nIn February of this year when I could finally leave the house without fear that my bladder would explode or decide to shut down on me, I started planning various trips.
\nThe library gave me many good ideas. Yosemite, walking trails, San Francisco and a couple on camping.\u00a0 YES! I could go camping!
\nI googled, I plan advisored, I read the local campsite reviews on a daily basis.\u00a0 After a few days I decided we would take our family to Rollin’s Lake.\u00a0 They had everything we would need.<\/p>\n

…and then the world came crashing in.<\/p>\n

When all the plans I had made for my life came to the forefront of my mind, the camping trip was a big one, “DEAR GOD! I ALREADY PAID FOR MY CAMPING TRIP IN JULY!”
\nMegan and Nancy took turns making sure I wasn’t alone those first couple of days. It happened to be the changing of the guards when I envisioned camping all by myself.
\nOver a short period of time, they had learned to communicate through glances and slight hand movements as to not spook me.\u00a0 I saw Nancy grimace and look at Megan for help.
\n“We will go!” Megan offered.
\n“Yeah, you guys can go.” Nancy is, hands down, an awesome friend…but she doesn’t camp. Her camping involves free bottles of soap and fresh towels in the morning. You can’t wrong her for that.<\/p>\n

As the days passed and I found myself doing all the things I planned to do…I started to get excited about the camping trip.<\/p>\n

On Friday I packed up all my gear; my lantern, stove, mummy bag, tent, air mattress, hammock and the kitchen sink.\u00a0 We headed out to Rollin’s Lake with 2 packed cars, 3 adults and 5 kids.<\/p>\n

How was it?<\/p>\n

AWESOME.<\/p>\n

The first night I made my way to the kids tent, narrowly avoiding falling down the hill. Once inside I changed my clothing and grabbed the zipper to let myself out.\u00a0 I zipped the screen. I zipped the main flap. It did not open. I grabbed the zipper and slid it over and then grabbed the other zipper and slid it down to the first one. Nothing…i’m STILL in the tent and it’s no closer to being open.
\n“how the fuck?” I try the zippers again with the same result. “are you freaking kidding me?” ONE MORE TIME.\u00a0 Same thing.
\n“Kaaaaaraa!!!”
\nThe embarrassment of having to ask my daughter to get me\u00a0 out of the tent is up there on the charts.\u00a0 This won’t seem so bad when she’s changing my diapers when I am 98 years old, but right now…it just sucks.<\/p>\n

We ended the night with S’mores. I didn’t even hesitate when I made one for myself. It has been since the middle of March since I have ate chocolate. I was oddly proud of that fact.
\nMegan’s son ate his own body weight in chocolate and talked non-stop for 4 solid hours. Scott would randomly say, “7 seconds of silence please.”\u00a0 we would turn down the stereo and listen to him in the tent with the girls telling stories about how his Dad’s house was eaten by bears and that he had only a t-shirt and underwear to his name.<\/p>\n

Saturday morning I was awoken with what I can only describe as low flying pterodactyls.\u00a0 After that, things can only get better.<\/p>\n

That afternoon was spent floating on the water and watching people zoom by on their wakeboards. We would all look at each other and silently wish we were either in the boat or gliding behind it.\u00a0 I had to remind myself that even though I wasn’t on a nice boat, I was healthy enough to be out of the house and exactly where I wanted to be.<\/p>\n

Walking back to the campground it started to rain. IN JULY. I was tempted to yell out, “IS THAT ALL YOU’VE GOT!?” but didn’t want to piss off the god of rain and start a monsoon.\u00a0 “I am not trippin’ on the rain. No stress. It’s just water falling from the sky.”\u00a0 I was trying to remember if I packed the cover for the top of my tent and sad that I wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep staring up at the stars like I did the night before.\u00a0 The rain stopped and the blue skies peeked around the trees. “thank you, rain god.”<\/p>\n

We found out that modern technology is a good thing when needing to call to check on the dogs…not so good when your teenagers had google at their fingertips and found out that snipe hunting was nothing but a practical joke.<\/p>\n

That afternoon, Shea asked if she could ‘cuddle’ with me at night, and I was excited to be camping with her for the first time she could remember. “Of course, Princess!”
\nI never realized what a cuddle bug she was. She snuggled in right next to me and as we were starting to tell stories, I fell asleep.<\/p>\n

Sunday morning I woke up to more rain and decided to just stay in my tent until it was gone and when I got up I wouldn’t complain too much about the mud.\u00a0 Strange as it sounds, the only sign of rain was the drops on our cars.\u00a0\u00a0 We packed pretty quickly and headed home.<\/p>\n

Now I had said this on my facebook page, —skydiving, scuba diving and sex don’t beat a hot shower after 3 days of camping.\u00a0 I was flooded with, “then you’re not having sex right!” to which I responded, “then you’re not camping right!”
\nI swear when I got into the shower today I was shocked by the amount of red dirt that filled the bottom of the tub.\u00a0 When I shaved my legs, I had more dirt than hair come off in the razor!
\nWhen I took my ponytail out, my hair didn’t even have the courtesy of falling down! It stayed there until I got it wet, and when I did I could smell campfire and bacon grease!<\/p>\n

Now the weekend is over, the girls are mom’ed out and went to stay with their daddy.<\/p>\n

I’m hoping the unloading fairies come to my house and unpack my truck.\u00a0 I’m not thinking it’s going to\u00a0 happen, but a girl can hope.<\/p>\n

So, many of you have asked, “What’s next?”<\/p>\n

Thursday I have my wind tunnel training.\u00a0 A trip to the ocean. 2 weekends of AFF training so I can sign off to jump out of a plane without my instructor there with me.\u00a0 A rafting trip down the Truckee river. Another weekend of jumping out of planes. A trip to Oregon (crossing fingers) to run a 5k.
\nThen I am going to spend the next 4 weeks looking for 2 more jobs to pay for all of it ;)<\/p>\n

My life…is good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In February of this year when I could finally leave the house without fear that my bladder would explode or decide to shut down on me, I started planning various trips. The library gave me many good ideas. Yosemite, walking trails, San Francisco and a couple on camping.\u00a0 YES! I could go camping! I googled,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomandodd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomandodd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomandodd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomandodd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomandodd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/randomandodd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomandodd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomandodd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomandodd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}