So yesterday I went camping for the second time in my life. The first time was when I was 10. It was my best friend's birthday, and she, her 19 year old cousin, her 14 year old brother, one other friend, her dad, and I all went. I remember almost nothing about this trip except for that when I woke up, her cousin was clutching my teddy bear to his chest. And that a few days later I found a tick on my head.
Now that I am 22, I thought camping would be a lot more fun. So I packed my stuff (teddy bear excluded this time), got picked up by some friends, and headed over to Brandon's house, who was driving. It was going to be me (Shelley..that's me, by the way), Corey (one of my best friends, also an ex from 10th grade), Matt, Brandon, and Brandon's girlfriend Morgan. We jammed all our stuff in to the car and headed an hour away to a place called Social Circle, Georgia. I don't know why the name tickled us as much as it did, but we kept imagining it would be a really friendly place. We even had a random runner wave at us as we passed the "Welcome to Social Circle" sign. As nice as that sounds, the place we camped at was called Hard Labor Creek. I don't know why they named it that. Maybe people used to do hard labor there. At the creek. I really don't know, but it sounded terrifying to me. I had thoughts of pulling up to our campsite to pitch the tent, and immediately being whisked away to smack boulders with those hammer/pick things...whatever they are. I don't know. Luckily that didn't happen, in fact the campsite was pretty friendly. The parking was even free that day! (Hooray!)
So as it turns out, they didn't actually have any "primitive" campsites. All they had was gravel squares with RV hookups. This was really kind of disappointing to me. Not that I couldn't experience nature as it was meant to be, free of technology. No, that's not what was disappointing. I was disappointed that we hadn't brought an RV. I know what you're thinking, okay? "What? That's not camping. That's parking in the woods." Yes, and I agree. But we brought a tent, and do you know how comfortable sleeping on gravel is? I'll give you a hint: Not very.
So the boys start setting up the tent. I do my best to not help at all. Not because I'm lazy, but because I have no earthly idea how to set up a tent. I don't care if this WAS one of those have-to-be-an-idiot-to-not-figure-it-out-color-coded tents. It was HARD. I helped a little bit. In the one thing I tried to help do, Brandon said I was doing it wrong. Sometimes I feel like I'm more help when I don't try to help at all.
They finally got the tent figured out. It was an "8 person" tent. That means 8 people SHOULD be able to sleep in it. That does not mean 8 people should be able to sleep comfortably in it. There were only five of us, but I know for a fact that one more person would've seriously complicated the arrangement. Anyway, I'll get to the sleeping part later.
We were all pretty hungry, so we cooked up dragon eggs. This is basically eggs, cheese, onions, green pepper, tomatoes, and bacon all cooked together in a delicious soufflé type thing. There wasn't really enough for all of us to be satisfied, hunger wise. Some people had seconds. They didn't ask if I was still hungry, or if I wanted some. I guess because I'm a girl and I'm smaller than them, I'm supposed to not eat as much. Well I hadn't really eaten lunch, so I felt like a bear. Or I suppose I could've just spoken up and not expected people to be considerate and ask if I wanted more, but to be honest, I didn't feel like making a fuss about it. So instead, I relied on two beers to fill me up. But they were lite, so it didn't really work. All it really did was make me have to pee. And as I mentioned before, I am a girl, and I really didn't want to pee in the woods that bad. With my luck I would get poison ivy on my butt (again), and it would really ruin the whole camping trip for me. So Morgan and I got in her car and drove to the bathroom. I know that's not how the pioneers did it, but I bet they got a lot more poison ivy butt than I will.
The rest of the night consisted of roasting marshmallows, singing and playing my guitar, and Settlers of Catan. It all sounds very fun, but there's really not much more to say about it. Morgan and Brandon got tired and went to sleep after all this. I went in the tent too because I wanted to change (our tent had little zip up room/closet thingys). I changed, and unzipped the little closet thing to go back out to Corey and Matt. When I went to unzip the front door of the tent, however, the zipper got stuck and I sat there for like five minutes trying to escape. Corey and Matt had zipped me in there and I was starting to panic thinking I'd never get out. At the time, it was a lot scarier than it really was. I had to get Brandon to get out of his sleeping bag to help me escape. This was kind of embarrassing. Try to picture one of those movie scenes were someone is trapped in a room, and they pound against the door, begging to be let out. That's how I felt. We eventually managed to get the zipper open enough for me to slip out the bottom. And good thing I went through all this trouble, because when I got out, I got to watch Corey and Matt play not one, but TWO games of Magic: The Gathering. Oh, thank god I didn't miss out on that!
They finally realize I'm bored (after only two games of me yawning, and swatting ferociously at the moths), and we move away from the light and talk for a few minutes. I can't remember what we talked about, but we laughed a lot, and then kept remembering we were supposed to be quiet because Morgan and Brandon were probably trying to sleep and getting really annoyed at us for being loud. So we figured we should probably just get in there and go to bed ourselves. This started out fine. We all had plenty of room and I even got to sleep with my legs in the closet! I wasn't totally comfortable (don't forget, we were sleeping on gravel), but that was okay because I was so tired, I just knew I'd fall right asleep. So I closed my eyes.
"Hmm..." I thought to myself, "I'm not falling asleep. That's okay, I'll try the counting thing." I started counting backwards from 100 in my head. This usually puts me right out. I got to about 89 when I heard, "Snnneneneehehhehhe". "What the hell was that?" I thought. Oh. Oh, nothing. It's okay, that's just Matt snoring. It happened again. And again. And this wasn't one of those quiet, cover your ears with the pillow and it goes away snores. It was high pitched and kind of loud. I did something really selfish right here. I coughed. On purpose. It woke him up for a minute, and he rolled over and stopped snoring. Success!! I started the counting thing again. It worked this time! I was asleep! And then I was awake again. This time it was a "chkchckchck" sound. I heard Corey and Matt whispering. Corey thought there was someone outside our tent, just waiting for the right moment to pounce the tent and kill us all. Matt said it was probably just an animal. I went back to sleep. Then the snoring started again. Eventually I guess it stopped and I went back to sleep. Then I heard Brandon and Morgan whispering to each other, which woke me up again. By the way, I'm an extremely light sleeper. This is really unfortunate for when you're sharing a tent with four other people. Finally, FINALLY the noises stopped, or I just got so exhausted that it didn't matter and I was out. Until really early this morning when Morgan's phone alarm went off. She left early to go hiking with some different friends. After that, I passed out until a few hours later (it was almost 11:30), when Brandon woke up Corey and I and said we needed to pack up. We found out the "chkchkchk" sound had been a raccoon that ravaged our trash and ate all our marshmallows. He was not conscientious enough to clean up after himself, either. Luckily Matt had cleaned up everything. But wait, where was Matt? He wasn't in the tent. He wasn't in the car. He wasn't on our site at all. I'm not going to lie, the first thing I thought was that maybe there HAD been a murderer outside our tent, and he got Matt!! But no, maybe he had just gone to pee? But then Brandon said he had been gone for two hours. Two hours?? Doing what? Matt was definitely dead, I was sure of it now. We sat down at the picnic table and accepted that Matt was gone and never coming back. We reminisced of all the good times we had shared. We laughed, we cried, we saw Matt coming up the trail towards us! He was alive! Then we cleaned up, packed the car, and hit the road. There's not much left to tell of this story. And I don't have much to show for this trip but three ant bites in a line on my foot. It looks kind of cool. I think they were trying to make a shape. Now to find the cortizone.
