Mountain tales

Back when we were registering for wedding gifts, I dragged Kevin over to the outdoor section of Target and declared that we needed to register for camping equipment.

"But we never go camping!" he said.

"Because we don't have camping equipment, duh!" I argued. And since he still lets me win a lot of our arguments, we registered for a ton of camping equipment. Also, we have awesome friends who like to buy us cool stuff we got pretty much all of the camping stuff we registered for....a cool tent, a great little stove and lantern, an air mattress and pump, cookware, a cooler. Pretty much everything and more that we would need for a decent weekend in the mountains. We added in some new captain's chairs and bedding for the air mattress and we were all set.

Not that we had time to go camping, what with classes and bowling and family obligations and so on and so forth. So we took everything to the storage unit and left it there until I decided it was high time to get our asses up to the mountain. Kevin was in charge of going to the storage unit to pick everything up, and I was in charge of planning the food and making the site reservation.

We headed up the mountain on Friday afternoon, looking forward to a weekend of nature and not much else.


Now, I never looked that closely at the pile of stuff that Kevin picked up and stashed in the trunk. And it's not like we had a list of stuff set aside for him to pick up. So really, it's not a surprise that we got all the way up the mountain and started unpacking only to realize that the air mattress was not there. And my prissy ass is too old to be sleeping on the hard ground. And so yes, Kevin drove back to the storage unit to get the air mattress, hour long drive be damned.

It was only AFTER he had left that I realized that we also did not have the comforter that would be providing sweet comfortable warmth for us that night. And my cell phone had zero coverage in the middle of the Cleveland National Forest (go figure). So I stayed there and hoped that he would notice it in the storage unit.

He returned bearing the air mattress...and the cookware, thank goodness. I asked him about the comforter, and yes, he'd seen it. He'd seen it and thought "Eh, it's hot this weekend and we've got the sheets so we'll be fine." Famous last words, right?


Yeah, it was warm all day and most of the night, but about an hour after we went to sleep, we were both rhivering because hello, it gets DAMN COLD at 6000 feet, even in the middle of the summer. I was reading The Devil Wears PRada right before sleeping and it was so cold I was have the frozen version of fever dreams about Meryl Streep as an evil supervillain. I woke up around 3 and had to hike over to the bathroom, which warmed me up at last. I practically ran back to the tent to get as warm as possible before diving back into bed and fall asleep before I got cold again.

I think we both got maybe 4 hours of actual sleep on Friday night. Needless to say, Staurday morning found us hustling over to the local store hoping to find a blanket or sleeping bag or SOMETHING because hell if we were sleeping in the cold again. (And some citronella candles because the DAMN BUGS were freaking us out.)

And then we went for a hike, saw some squirrels, and spent the rest of the day reading and napping. Once we had that sleeping bag in hand, the weekend started looking way up.


We figure this past weekend was just our test run. It had been years since either of us had gone camping, but at least now we both know what not to forget (ahem). And also, I highly recommend hiding out in the mountains for a weekend at least every so often because seriously, the disconnection is blissful, even if it did turn me into a total misanthrope for the next 48 hours.

Seriously, I did not want to be around ANYONE until late today. I hated everyone because it was too noisy and annoying back in civilization. Apparently, I secretly wish I could live in a tent on the mountain all the time.

Except not without showers, because showers are awesome.