Camping

As you may have guessed, I had my doubts about the whole camping thing this weekend. Though I am a little bit more outdoorsy than some friends of mine, I'm definitely not the fearless, wilderness, camping type. I like being outside, but I also tend to cry when I get scared. So anyway, there was some trepidation surrounding this weekend.

Fears were doubled when Wright and I met Kate and Nick, our fellow campers, at Grand Central on Saturday morning. Wright and I each had a small handbag - him, a gym bag filled with a pair of hiking shoes and a couple of tshirts and me, a small red weekender with (gulp) white flowers on it, filled with sneakers and workout clothes. Wright also brought his cast iron pan, but we couldn't find anything to carry it in, so we threw it into one of those black Barney's Co-op tote bags that they give you at the Westchester Mall store (unrelated note: why do you only get those at that store?).

Anyway, Kate and Nick each had on a real hiker's backpack, the kind that could fit me inside of it, and were carrying their fancy chairs and everything! I looked down at my flowered bag and the (really Calvine, why would you decide to do this to yourself) Barney's bag and just about died of nervous laughter. WHAT were we getting into?!?!

To make a long story short, things went up from there. Wright and I bought a tent at Modell's in Port Chester, and Mom helped me get together various things like flashlights and bug spray. We even found my old Crazy Creek from camp! We hit major traffic on the way up to the campsite, but upon arrival, I had finally relaxed 100%. The campsite was beautiful and the weather was ideal.

We reserved a site at Mongaup Pond, a New York State Park up in the Catskills, normally about a 2 hour drive from the city, on Saturday, a 3 hour drive. As luck would have it, we snagged the last site on the water and it was stunning.

We settled in very quickly - the boys doing things like carrying and chopping wood and Kate and I doing things like chatting and relaxing. We set up the tents, opened up our preferred beverages (Beer for the boys, Mike's Hard Lemonade for Kate, Coronita for me) and breathed in the non-city air. It was beyond refreshing. Hard to believe we were only 2 hours away - it felt like a million miles!

I'll have more to tell later on this week about our adventures in cooking, bald-eagle spotting, canoeing, and bears - it was truly an eventful 24 hours!