"If We Get To The Top Of The Hill, And It's Like Burning Man Up There..."

Ahh, the thing allowing the unrighteous and misplaced anger of customers, who honestly should not be left on their own for survival, to flow over me like water is memories of camping. I’m having a little zen moment here. It's the thing keeping me in my seat and not charging someone with my stick to cause serious damage. Well that and Brian Eno's Here Come The Warm Jets.

We set across the mountains towards vague directions of a campground on a lake. This was because of me, the vagueness I mean. I like to under-plan when I take trips, to "wing it" as it were. I have found that if things start to get too planned, there leaves little room for happy accidents that tend to be the best part of the trip. This began with my first trip to Europe where I would decide what city or country to visit next by looking at the destination board at the train station and see which train was to leave the soonest.

But not everyone likes to vacation in this fashion, and sometimes I need to remember this. So when we arrived at our destination to find that the campground was full, I could feel a little stress in the vehicle (that on top of the seatbelt digging into my rectum). We asked the matronly park ranger for any recommendations and she suggested going away from the campground and into the woods where we could free camp and there were no rules.

This, by the by, is just the thing a car full of people with more alcohol in their supplies than food wants to hear.

She tried to back down her statement a little bit, perhaps after seeing all of our eyes alight with berserker anticipation of raping and pillaging this forest of no rules. She told us as there was no one to patrol the area there could be all manner of drunk and disorderly behavior going on up there. Not exactly dissuading us... When we asked about campfires, she did say that this wasn't allowed. However, no rules and no one to patrol the area trumps no campfires in my book.

So we traveled up the unpaved road, into the old growth pines, and found a little overgrown path away from the road. What we found at the end of the path was a perfect little clearing where someone had dug a fire pit in the not so distant past. It was just up a slight hill from a summer shallow river, from which you could get a magnificent view of granite faces of the surrounding peaks and miles and miles of trees. We were, for all intents and purposes, in the middle of nowhere. We were NOT 20 feet from a family whose idea of camping was to pack their house into a smaller, mobile version of their house and park it on asphalt.

What we found by happy accident was actually the exact sort of camping I was hoping for. This was, in two words, fucking perfect.

Even after a light after bed rain, the sound of which drumming on the tent still makes me smile wistfully, soaked our firewood, everyone approached the morning undeterred. We got a fire going again and had a fireside breakfast of bacon, eggs and fire toasted doughnut holes.

Thanks Biffy, thanks Mandy and Jason, thanks Nikki 2 K's for a great little vacation weekend. It reignited my passion for camping so that I cannot wait to go again. And smelling that musky campfire smell on my hat all day yesterday even made doing the laundry feel okay.

Will there be more tomorrow about this? More than likely…