camping

We just got back into town from (yet) another wedding. It was excellent. Being the film nerd that I am, I of course have no photos to share yet, but I will. Maybe next week.

In the meantime, I thought I'd share some photos from Jared and my one camping trip of the summer so far. Because of all of our traveling, we hadn't made any plans for camping this summer. But when we discovered at the last minute that we both had the Monday after the 4th of July (now you can see how behind I am on posting this!), we decided to spend Sunday night outdoors. We chose a park that was not too far, had walk-in campsites, and (at least appeared to) had a lot of swimming holes.

I'm hoping that we can take at least one more before it gets too damn cold for sleeping outdoors, though maybe we can push it into October again, like we did a few years ago for my birthday. This was our first time camping with the dog, and let me tell you, it was an experience. I feel extremely fortunate that Freddie came to us as a very well-behaved dog. He's super friendly to other people and dogs, doesn't bark too much, is not destructive at all, never gets into food that's not his, doesn't run away when he's off the leash, and on and on and on. Really, he's such a good dog. But, he's got some major anxiety issues. The one time he got sick a couple of months ago...yeah. The vet said it was stress-induced colitis. Stress-induced?! Apparently our dog is stressed. He has for sure calmed down since we got him back in January, but he can definitely be a basket-case.

So yeah. We get to the parking lot by the campsite. Freddie is freaking out. Within the first half an hour of the trip, he's already chewed through his gentle leader and his leash. In state parks, dog must be on leashes at all times. Problem. Luckily (sort of) he chewed through the leash a few feet from where it clipped on to his collar, so we could sort of still use it as a leash, despite the fact that having a leash wrapped around your hand while your basketcase of a dog is pulling like crazy, is not so much fun. Other highlights of the trip included all the places that I thought were swimming holes actually being swamps, the horrible combination of insane mosquitos and my determination to use lemon eucalyptus oil as a bug repellent, and Freddie getting covered in burrs.

Now that I've convinced you that this trip was a disaster, I will now say that it was actually excellent. I did get to go swimming a little bit. We had our usual delicious camping meal of "hobo potatoes" and veggies on a skewer. Despite not being able to hike (due to the lack of a real leash and the bugs), we had fun just chilling at the campsite. And after his initial panic attack, Freddie seemed to really enjoy himself. So there you have it. The first (and hopefully not last) camping trip of 2009.
ps: if you're not big on camping and don't know where to start, check out Alicia's excellent thoughts on camping.