The Great Camping Fiasco

I love camping. I really, really love to camp. So when I asked Adrienne if she wanted to go camping the weekend she'd be home, I had idealistic mental images of a tent in the woods, kayaks in the water, and campfires in...campfire spots. Like most of my camping experiences. Well, Adrienne came home, and we did go camping last week. It just didn't look exactly how I had pictured. There were a series of mishaps and unfortunate circumstances that contributed to the crushing of my camping ideals. The first was the fact that when I got online to reserve our camping spots the morning before, every spot at Sheridan Lake and any surrounding National Forrest campground was already reserved. Hmmm. No problem...plan B...we'd just "find some place in the hills when we get out there." Second problem: the kayaks I rented at an affordable rate turned out to be 12 foot ocean kayaks, not 6 foot river kayaks. We had two of them. I have one compact car. Despite my most valiant efforts, my father convinced me in his logical engineering way that there was no possible way I could put two 12 foot kayaks on top of my itty-bitty hatch-back. So we were forced to borrow my brothers monster truck (Ford F150.) By the time we actually got the whole kayak transportation problem solved, it was rather late in the day, and Adrienne and I were starving. This was just fine, because we had planned on eating dinner at the Alpine Inn, which, in my humble opinion happens to be the best dinner in the hills. Unfortunately, the 1/2 hour wait for a table turned into a 2 hour wait for a table when they accidently missed our names on the list, and we didn't get out of the place until 10:30. By this time it was very dark, and the only place we could find to camp was a lovely AAA approved family campground near Hill City. Nice, but not really my idea of "roughing it." They only had one spot left. We didn't ask to see the spot until after we'd paid for it. (We were tired. Give us a break.) Refer to exhibit C. We were practically camping in a parking lot. It was 112 degrees during the day and 78 at night, so the campfire seemed somewhat impractical. The rest of the weekend continued in pretty much this same manner. Etc. Etc. Etc. A smidge less than ideal. Nonetheless, Adrienne and I had a delightful time. The whole thing turned out to be pretty hilarious in it's not-going-as-planned nature. And, we invented a new kind of water sport. We haven't named it yet. The general idea is that you paddle your kayak out to the middle of the lake, sit there until a speed boat whizzes by, and then "ride the wake." I don't think I'd call it an "extreme" sport, but we haven't perfected it yet. I'll let my know when we do. So, that was the "camping" (only to be spoken of with the use of air quotes) weekend. I'm actually leaving again in 5 minutes for another "camping" adventure, this time in a friend's cabin, with my huge family and lots of board games, and no fire (because there is a fire ban right now). And no 12 foot kayaks.