China Beach Camping trip: Day 1
i left badly. i left in a frenzy. i had so much stuff to carry down to the car. i lent heather the car to pick sarita up from langley the night before so my house keys were not with the bunch. ya. didn't remember that on my first trip down, loaded like a pack mule, smashing into walls. luckily i saw a young man washing the windows in the gloomy unlit lobby. i ran around the building to the front. my hair was wet and pinned up. "forgot my keys!" i mumbled in a nevertheless ridiculously upbeat manner to the kid as i rushed by. in the door, grab some loose keys, grab a bunch more stuff, down i go. the thing with the keys that i grabbed was, that they happened to be heather's spare keys that she keeps at our place and they don't work on my door. ran around again. this time there was a wad of paper towel keeping the door open and thankfully no kid to explain my loopy ways to. one more load to go! couldn't find my keys. panic rising. took deep breaths and said a prayer in my head as i stopped for a glass of water. before i was done gulping i remembered where they were. the last time i put them on the hook the night before, they slipped and hit my bag that was also hanging there. i'll fix it later. i'll remember i told myself lazily.
packed the trunk, drove the two blocks to heather's and picked up her and sarita and all of their stuff. i'm good at packing my trunk but it can only take so much. the rest rode in the back with heather. sarita wedged her tighter than a drum back pack between her legs. when heather came out the door she was holding my shorts in her outstreched hand. i tried to ignore them. "laura. here's your shorts!" called heather. "i don't want them!" i said irritably. i got all ornary about the shorts. i mean my stuff was packed and wedged in and here is heather handing me some loose shorts. couldn't she wait some other time to return what she borrowed? they ended up getting stuffed in my car emergency bag. the shorts topic kept coming up throughout the trip. "hey laura want your shorts??" heather or sarita would goad.
before we left heather's i called karey on my cell to wish her a happy birthday. no answer. rude. (just a jork, karey) so i sang her some birthday songs and heather and sarita joined in when they could. i hope you had a swell birthday kare. and i hope you like your present.....when you get it, that is. haha!
just as we were pulling in to the terminal at tswassen, heather and sarita both confess that they only have debit. whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?? i gasp. i forgot that these girls do not take the ferry very often. i broke the news to them that the ferry does not take debit. we were three away from the ticket booth. heather and sarita feverishly count their change but we do not have enough. i told the lady that we realized that we didn't have enough and she did not even bat an eye. "need an atm?" she guessed. so she directed us down lane 34. she said to come back and park behind her booth, booth 10, once we had our money. of course this put her in our good books.
an omish/hutterite/menonite couple were parked behind us in line. she had a bonnet and a dress, but he was dressed in an unremarkable manner. they were nervous about leaving their car, but i assured them that they announce when it's time to board the ferry and give you lots of time to get back to your car. so off they went into the shops area. well. right after that our whole line moved up. we weren't boarding the ferry but part of the front part of our line was, so we all moved up and everyone drove around the car behind us. we felt bad. we felt we had betrayed them. we looked in the shops. the gelato at that place is so artistically displayed. it's beautiful and scrumptious looking at the same time. we mostly looked at jewelry. i eyed the ali babba pizza but refrained. it cost 4 something a slice and besides i had just eaten a ham and cheese sub sandwich that heather and sarita had purchased in a pack of six from walmart the day before. we added mustard and chips.
it sure is nice when the ferry leaves every hour. it didn't take long before we were boarding the 11 oh clock ferry. and it was a nice ferry. a ferry that the likes of us po folk in nanaimo don't even dream of ever riding. we all started reading our various books (i was reading little alters everywhere, the book that goes with the ya ya sisterhood). i also played around with heather's new camera, showing her the features and how you could do this and how you could do that etc. she nodded and made understanding noises, but i knew i was telling her too much detail.
this is where i was playing with the colour. that's sarita in the background.
heather was getting a kick out of sarita's survival book. she especially liked the what to do if someone is shooting at you part.
i decided i was pushing my luck, pestering them with the camera so i started to read. just when my eyelids started drooping, heather asked me if i wanted to go outside for a while. sure! i said. no one ever wants to go outside with me on the ferries (unless it's karey) anymore.
we fooled around and took pics. here i am trapped in this glass box.
heather was less trapped.
anyway, we were walking around enjoying ourselves when we came upon the ship naturalist (do we have anything like that on nanaimo ferries??? no we do not. we most definately do not.) she was giving a presentation. on orcas, on the islands, the eagles, the history, the glass sponge choral unique to our waters. heather and i sat ourselves down and enjoyed the presentation. we were some of the few canadians there. most were from the states or off continent. i snapped random shots idly while we listened. this is our reflection.
this is me and heather. she's got her listening ears on.
what can i say, i'm a sucker for a reflection. i'm also a sucker for a dorky expression. and i have lots of them. they just come naturally. you can see that heather is raising a quizzical brow at me.
this photo speaks for itself.
once off the ferry we dealth with the first problem of our ill planning. we didn't have a map. we weren't sure exactly how to get to highway 14 that led to our campsite. so i drove all the way downtown and around a bit before sarita, who served part of her mission in victoria, got in the game and got me over the bridge to esquimalt. then we saw a gas station and stopped for gas and a map. the girl there who was very victoia-esque, gave us some good directions, and sarita took charge with the map. although she did worry somewhat that the actual campsite was off the boundries of the map. it took several times of me telling her that it was right off of the highway for that fact to sink in. anyways the point is, we stopped at a thrifty foods along the way for food.
if karey my best friend, was dead, (god forbid!) she would roll over in her grave so many times that she might drill herself right out of her coffin. then she'd come over and smack us all in the head. as it is, i wouldn't be surprised if she got any unexplained uncomfy feelings during her birthday weekend due to us. i'm saying this because we were so disorganized and unplanned and forgetful this whole trip. now on my own part, i wasn't surprised. what do you expect when i've always camped with the fam or karey. karey has lists. karey has supplies. karey thinks of things and she reminds me of things. she's got all her stuff in rubbermade containers! actually thanks to karey we had plastic cups and cutlery because they were in the cooler that she left here when she moved last summer. (also the soccer glasses) anyways i thought of her and how frustrated she'd be with us as we were shopping. we decided to have fruit for breakfast, (bananas, oranges and nectarines), and hot dogs for all other meals. this amuses me. i added soup, and picked out some tomatoe red peppar carton soup. the carton soup was too much for the cousins. they hummed and haaawed over the canned soup, realizing we didn't have a can opener after picking their soups out. then they saw the soups with the flip tops. sarita got three and heather two. don't get me started on the trail mix. they each got their own bag. they each looked at the amount after and went back to get more. they each screwed up their faces about chocolate in trail mix. ??? not wanting trailmix that badly, didn't get my own chocolate kind. we got twice baked potato salad (yum! like a baked potato), we got chips, we got water, we got paper plates ( to tell you the truth, i went back for them when the others were at the check out. then i was sent for the ice). heather got her own yoghurt. unwilling to share and not ashamed of it. the food came to something that was easy to divide into three, thankfully and the guy who was working the check out beside the one we were at heard us trying to divide the gas into 3 and told us it was 16.66. uhhhhh thanks check out math genius we said.
back at the car, we wondered where to put our stuff. the only thing to do was pack around heather in the back seat.
"let's put heather in first" i advised and then laughed. heather gets a lot of this being the runt friend that she is. this gives you somewhat of an idea of how well we packed around heather and you can't even see the huge thing of fire wood that she was straddling. she was cheerful about it though. i'll give her that.
nothing else exciting happened before we reached camp besides the rain subsiding and it getting sunnier and sunnier.
here, i'm including two unflattering shots of me putting up the tent with sarita. (got to keep myself humble) the ground was really hard and heather forgot her hatchet, no one brought a hammer and sarita forgot her new bbq. i used a rock to pound the stakes as far as we could into the rocky earth. our campsite was in stands of sitka spruce, douglas fir and cedar. we liked the site because there was lots of woods between you and your neighbours and you never felt like you were too close to anyone. also luckily for the
girls who pee A LOT, we were close to the outhouses , which were actually very nice outhouses. not smelly, very clean and spacious.
they even had real tolet paper dispensers, aaaaaaaaaaand the piece d'resistanse, they had hand sanitizer in every outhouse! now that's living!
heather and the tent.
heather's foot and the wild woods that surrounded us.
after setting up, (we were a comedy unto ourselves. we had trees on three sides to tie the tarp to, but the fourth side was a conundrum. heather solved it by stealing a dead branch from the forrest floor (a real no-no, for which one may be fined and expelled from camp by ranger man), driving my paring knife (amidst protests from me) into the hole of the tarp and then into the top of the branch and then tying that to a peg in the ground. it actually worked pretty well but most of the time heather, who never likes to do anything wrong or get in trouble was antsy about the pilfered branch most of the camping time. she would set her chair in front of it, hoping to hide it from the all seeing eyes of mr. ranger man. but we never saw him the whole time. also i forgot the pump to elicia's air mattress at home. this was a bitter discovery. so i went site to site begging for a pump. well i asked a french lady and she said theirs was a car pump and her husband was gone. then i asked some nice ladies with a dog that wanted to eat me, and they had a pristine red and blue foot pump. she handed it to me almost gingerly explaining it's obvious use. during sarita's turn to pump when it was almost all the way full we heard a hissing, panicked and stopped pumping. later we regretted this because it wasn't quite all the way pumped up, but oh well.) we went for a walk to 2nd beach. 2nd beach was got to through a 1km forrest path.
the forrest was pretty and had lots of neato mushrooms. this was one.
me and sarita catchin our breath at the top of a hill on a well placed bench. heather has a sore knee. she was our cripple lagging behind. i like this shot because it shows how great the forrest really was. really really.
another cool 'shroom.
me in the woods. i was all peppy and full of energy and we sang and made funny noises to warn the bears and cougars (both in the area) that we were there.
since bethany and i found a perfectly round ruffled black slug taking down our tent at the family reunion, i've developed an interest in the slimy creatures. here are two slug buddies hanging out by a neato mushroom. s and h are from the east where slugs are small. our slugs really gross them out.
some tree hugging and loving went on, i'm not ashamed to admit it.
i selfishly wanted to be in the middle because it's the most flattering position. this is in the middle of our steep decent down to the beach, on a wooden platform. i like this shot because i tricked the camera into making me look young, like i used to look no tricks involved.
this is me forcing heather to take a picture of us.
our first view of water.
and we made it to the beach! it was a beautiful evening and we all proceeded to go our own way and explore. i left the camera with heather because it is hers afterall and it's hard to reign myself in at times, and if she let me i would totally take over, which i did at times but tried not to. you know how it is.
heather took this one of me and sarita wandering the sands. i like it.
eventually we all caught up with one another and began taking shots of each other.
me and sarita in the glow of the setting sun.
and me and the heather. remind me never to do that pose again.
sarita captures our reflections in the wet sand.
i hope y'all (i really thought that word, so i had to use it. it's from reading that southern lingo in the book!) don't get offended by this series. it's my sillohette series. i was taking sillohetes of sarita on her camera and i wanted some of my own, so heather indulged me. and it got a little out of hand.
and that's the end. i mean what can you do after you've done the karate kid crane?
it was time to go because the sun was setting and we didn't want to walk through the dark bear filled woods, so we started back. but i had the camera now, so i lingered.
self shot. i like it.
a heron that i previously suprised coming around a bend.
heather did this. and it's not her only perpetration of this outrageous sort.
i like how you can see the sun-ball in this pic.
i told heather to take a self shot of herself while she was standing on this log (i had been putting on my shoes and told them not to go without me just a while before. when i said "heather--" she cut me off with "what! i'm not going anywhere!" haha. "woah." i said and then explained my idea) then i proceeded to poke my head into her shot. when she took it down to look at it, she burst out laughing and said she could see my eyeball.
so she did it again. i couldn't help but do it again as well. then she layed down the law and i had had my fill so i complied.
one last shot of myself and the beach before heading back into the woods. h&s were getting worried. the path back was brutal. steep ups. lots of stairs. and we were booting it. we were all huffing and puffing loudly. i tried to sing too. but it was hard. heather said there was no way she could. she could barley breathe. gosh. we're so out of shape (for a minute i was going to say we're so out of order, but i knew that wasn't right). there was in fact a spooky part in the darker woods but we booted it through there and before we knew it we could see the tents through the woods and we were back.
heather went to brownies. she was in charge of all the fires. this is when we realized that sarita forgot some of her matches. just another part of our disorganization.
heather gives her oblations to the fire god. well not really but i caught her in that split second pose as the flames started to leap and crackle.
i told heather to take this one of me through the sparks. cool hey?
then things got vicious and scary.
thanks to that little grill we cooked our wieners. we cooked everything on it actually. but this was the first night and our first meal. two dogs each.
we had a fun time at the fire and sat around and had hot chocloate and the girls played with that wind up radio heather got for her birthday. we were so close to the fire that our legs burnt and our shoes were burning hot. it felt so good. i love the feel of the the heat as it hits my eyes. i asked h&s if they felt the same. they looked at me funny and denied ever feeling that way. strange. i said you know, like when you're in the shower and you wish you could be surrounded in heat, especially behind your eyes, or in the bathtub sometimes i sink my head beneath the water and hold my breath so my eyes can feel the heat.... "ooooookay" says sarita like i am in need of serious help. i guess it's just me i shrugged.
later in the tent, we giggled and sarita in her miner's head flashlight just put us over the edge. we played "would you rather ______ or________". led by sarita. most of them had to do with kissing so and so or so and so. i felt like a grade sixer at a sleep over. eventually we started falling asleep. my nose was cold right away, and no matter how far i pulled up the covers or down the hoodie, it was cold all night. and my bum was cold from the cold air in the mattress. everyone had a really cold night and a light sleep. i stayed in one position the whole time because it was impossible to move around on the air mattress without bouncing around. it was messy and i didn't want to do it. h&s made two pee trips, i believe. we didn't wake up unitl 9.
packed the trunk, drove the two blocks to heather's and picked up her and sarita and all of their stuff. i'm good at packing my trunk but it can only take so much. the rest rode in the back with heather. sarita wedged her tighter than a drum back pack between her legs. when heather came out the door she was holding my shorts in her outstreched hand. i tried to ignore them. "laura. here's your shorts!" called heather. "i don't want them!" i said irritably. i got all ornary about the shorts. i mean my stuff was packed and wedged in and here is heather handing me some loose shorts. couldn't she wait some other time to return what she borrowed? they ended up getting stuffed in my car emergency bag. the shorts topic kept coming up throughout the trip. "hey laura want your shorts??" heather or sarita would goad.
before we left heather's i called karey on my cell to wish her a happy birthday. no answer. rude. (just a jork, karey) so i sang her some birthday songs and heather and sarita joined in when they could. i hope you had a swell birthday kare. and i hope you like your present.....when you get it, that is. haha!
just as we were pulling in to the terminal at tswassen, heather and sarita both confess that they only have debit. whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?? i gasp. i forgot that these girls do not take the ferry very often. i broke the news to them that the ferry does not take debit. we were three away from the ticket booth. heather and sarita feverishly count their change but we do not have enough. i told the lady that we realized that we didn't have enough and she did not even bat an eye. "need an atm?" she guessed. so she directed us down lane 34. she said to come back and park behind her booth, booth 10, once we had our money. of course this put her in our good books.
an omish/hutterite/menonite couple were parked behind us in line. she had a bonnet and a dress, but he was dressed in an unremarkable manner. they were nervous about leaving their car, but i assured them that they announce when it's time to board the ferry and give you lots of time to get back to your car. so off they went into the shops area. well. right after that our whole line moved up. we weren't boarding the ferry but part of the front part of our line was, so we all moved up and everyone drove around the car behind us. we felt bad. we felt we had betrayed them. we looked in the shops. the gelato at that place is so artistically displayed. it's beautiful and scrumptious looking at the same time. we mostly looked at jewelry. i eyed the ali babba pizza but refrained. it cost 4 something a slice and besides i had just eaten a ham and cheese sub sandwich that heather and sarita had purchased in a pack of six from walmart the day before. we added mustard and chips.
it sure is nice when the ferry leaves every hour. it didn't take long before we were boarding the 11 oh clock ferry. and it was a nice ferry. a ferry that the likes of us po folk in nanaimo don't even dream of ever riding. we all started reading our various books (i was reading little alters everywhere, the book that goes with the ya ya sisterhood). i also played around with heather's new camera, showing her the features and how you could do this and how you could do that etc. she nodded and made understanding noises, but i knew i was telling her too much detail.
this is where i was playing with the colour. that's sarita in the background.
heather was getting a kick out of sarita's survival book. she especially liked the what to do if someone is shooting at you part.
i decided i was pushing my luck, pestering them with the camera so i started to read. just when my eyelids started drooping, heather asked me if i wanted to go outside for a while. sure! i said. no one ever wants to go outside with me on the ferries (unless it's karey) anymore.
we fooled around and took pics. here i am trapped in this glass box.
heather was less trapped.
anyway, we were walking around enjoying ourselves when we came upon the ship naturalist (do we have anything like that on nanaimo ferries??? no we do not. we most definately do not.) she was giving a presentation. on orcas, on the islands, the eagles, the history, the glass sponge choral unique to our waters. heather and i sat ourselves down and enjoyed the presentation. we were some of the few canadians there. most were from the states or off continent. i snapped random shots idly while we listened. this is our reflection.
this is me and heather. she's got her listening ears on.
what can i say, i'm a sucker for a reflection. i'm also a sucker for a dorky expression. and i have lots of them. they just come naturally. you can see that heather is raising a quizzical brow at me.
this photo speaks for itself.
once off the ferry we dealth with the first problem of our ill planning. we didn't have a map. we weren't sure exactly how to get to highway 14 that led to our campsite. so i drove all the way downtown and around a bit before sarita, who served part of her mission in victoria, got in the game and got me over the bridge to esquimalt. then we saw a gas station and stopped for gas and a map. the girl there who was very victoia-esque, gave us some good directions, and sarita took charge with the map. although she did worry somewhat that the actual campsite was off the boundries of the map. it took several times of me telling her that it was right off of the highway for that fact to sink in. anyways the point is, we stopped at a thrifty foods along the way for food.
if karey my best friend, was dead, (god forbid!) she would roll over in her grave so many times that she might drill herself right out of her coffin. then she'd come over and smack us all in the head. as it is, i wouldn't be surprised if she got any unexplained uncomfy feelings during her birthday weekend due to us. i'm saying this because we were so disorganized and unplanned and forgetful this whole trip. now on my own part, i wasn't surprised. what do you expect when i've always camped with the fam or karey. karey has lists. karey has supplies. karey thinks of things and she reminds me of things. she's got all her stuff in rubbermade containers! actually thanks to karey we had plastic cups and cutlery because they were in the cooler that she left here when she moved last summer. (also the soccer glasses) anyways i thought of her and how frustrated she'd be with us as we were shopping. we decided to have fruit for breakfast, (bananas, oranges and nectarines), and hot dogs for all other meals. this amuses me. i added soup, and picked out some tomatoe red peppar carton soup. the carton soup was too much for the cousins. they hummed and haaawed over the canned soup, realizing we didn't have a can opener after picking their soups out. then they saw the soups with the flip tops. sarita got three and heather two. don't get me started on the trail mix. they each got their own bag. they each looked at the amount after and went back to get more. they each screwed up their faces about chocolate in trail mix. ??? not wanting trailmix that badly, didn't get my own chocolate kind. we got twice baked potato salad (yum! like a baked potato), we got chips, we got water, we got paper plates ( to tell you the truth, i went back for them when the others were at the check out. then i was sent for the ice). heather got her own yoghurt. unwilling to share and not ashamed of it. the food came to something that was easy to divide into three, thankfully and the guy who was working the check out beside the one we were at heard us trying to divide the gas into 3 and told us it was 16.66. uhhhhh thanks check out math genius we said.
back at the car, we wondered where to put our stuff. the only thing to do was pack around heather in the back seat.
"let's put heather in first" i advised and then laughed. heather gets a lot of this being the runt friend that she is. this gives you somewhat of an idea of how well we packed around heather and you can't even see the huge thing of fire wood that she was straddling. she was cheerful about it though. i'll give her that.nothing else exciting happened before we reached camp besides the rain subsiding and it getting sunnier and sunnier.
here, i'm including two unflattering shots of me putting up the tent with sarita. (got to keep myself humble) the ground was really hard and heather forgot her hatchet, no one brought a hammer and sarita forgot her new bbq. i used a rock to pound the stakes as far as we could into the rocky earth. our campsite was in stands of sitka spruce, douglas fir and cedar. we liked the site because there was lots of woods between you and your neighbours and you never felt like you were too close to anyone. also luckily for thegirls who pee A LOT, we were close to the outhouses , which were actually very nice outhouses. not smelly, very clean and spacious.
they even had real tolet paper dispensers, aaaaaaaaaaand the piece d'resistanse, they had hand sanitizer in every outhouse! now that's living!
heather and the tent.
heather's foot and the wild woods that surrounded us.
after setting up, (we were a comedy unto ourselves. we had trees on three sides to tie the tarp to, but the fourth side was a conundrum. heather solved it by stealing a dead branch from the forrest floor (a real no-no, for which one may be fined and expelled from camp by ranger man), driving my paring knife (amidst protests from me) into the hole of the tarp and then into the top of the branch and then tying that to a peg in the ground. it actually worked pretty well but most of the time heather, who never likes to do anything wrong or get in trouble was antsy about the pilfered branch most of the camping time. she would set her chair in front of it, hoping to hide it from the all seeing eyes of mr. ranger man. but we never saw him the whole time. also i forgot the pump to elicia's air mattress at home. this was a bitter discovery. so i went site to site begging for a pump. well i asked a french lady and she said theirs was a car pump and her husband was gone. then i asked some nice ladies with a dog that wanted to eat me, and they had a pristine red and blue foot pump. she handed it to me almost gingerly explaining it's obvious use. during sarita's turn to pump when it was almost all the way full we heard a hissing, panicked and stopped pumping. later we regretted this because it wasn't quite all the way pumped up, but oh well.) we went for a walk to 2nd beach. 2nd beach was got to through a 1km forrest path.
the forrest was pretty and had lots of neato mushrooms. this was one.
me and sarita catchin our breath at the top of a hill on a well placed bench. heather has a sore knee. she was our cripple lagging behind. i like this shot because it shows how great the forrest really was. really really.
another cool 'shroom.
me in the woods. i was all peppy and full of energy and we sang and made funny noises to warn the bears and cougars (both in the area) that we were there.
since bethany and i found a perfectly round ruffled black slug taking down our tent at the family reunion, i've developed an interest in the slimy creatures. here are two slug buddies hanging out by a neato mushroom. s and h are from the east where slugs are small. our slugs really gross them out.
some tree hugging and loving went on, i'm not ashamed to admit it.
i selfishly wanted to be in the middle because it's the most flattering position. this is in the middle of our steep decent down to the beach, on a wooden platform. i like this shot because i tricked the camera into making me look young, like i used to look no tricks involved.
this is me forcing heather to take a picture of us.
our first view of water.
and we made it to the beach! it was a beautiful evening and we all proceeded to go our own way and explore. i left the camera with heather because it is hers afterall and it's hard to reign myself in at times, and if she let me i would totally take over, which i did at times but tried not to. you know how it is.
heather took this one of me and sarita wandering the sands. i like it.
eventually we all caught up with one another and began taking shots of each other.me and sarita in the glow of the setting sun.
and me and the heather. remind me never to do that pose again.
sarita captures our reflections in the wet sand.
i hope y'all (i really thought that word, so i had to use it. it's from reading that southern lingo in the book!) don't get offended by this series. it's my sillohette series. i was taking sillohetes of sarita on her camera and i wanted some of my own, so heather indulged me. and it got a little out of hand.
and that's the end. i mean what can you do after you've done the karate kid crane?
it was time to go because the sun was setting and we didn't want to walk through the dark bear filled woods, so we started back. but i had the camera now, so i lingered.
self shot. i like it.
a heron that i previously suprised coming around a bend.
heather did this. and it's not her only perpetration of this outrageous sort.
i like how you can see the sun-ball in this pic.
i told heather to take a self shot of herself while she was standing on this log (i had been putting on my shoes and told them not to go without me just a while before. when i said "heather--" she cut me off with "what! i'm not going anywhere!" haha. "woah." i said and then explained my idea) then i proceeded to poke my head into her shot. when she took it down to look at it, she burst out laughing and said she could see my eyeball.
so she did it again. i couldn't help but do it again as well. then she layed down the law and i had had my fill so i complied.
one last shot of myself and the beach before heading back into the woods. h&s were getting worried. the path back was brutal. steep ups. lots of stairs. and we were booting it. we were all huffing and puffing loudly. i tried to sing too. but it was hard. heather said there was no way she could. she could barley breathe. gosh. we're so out of shape (for a minute i was going to say we're so out of order, but i knew that wasn't right). there was in fact a spooky part in the darker woods but we booted it through there and before we knew it we could see the tents through the woods and we were back.
heather went to brownies. she was in charge of all the fires. this is when we realized that sarita forgot some of her matches. just another part of our disorganization.
heather gives her oblations to the fire god. well not really but i caught her in that split second pose as the flames started to leap and crackle.
i told heather to take this one of me through the sparks. cool hey?
then things got vicious and scary.
thanks to that little grill we cooked our wieners. we cooked everything on it actually. but this was the first night and our first meal. two dogs each.
we had a fun time at the fire and sat around and had hot chocloate and the girls played with that wind up radio heather got for her birthday. we were so close to the fire that our legs burnt and our shoes were burning hot. it felt so good. i love the feel of the the heat as it hits my eyes. i asked h&s if they felt the same. they looked at me funny and denied ever feeling that way. strange. i said you know, like when you're in the shower and you wish you could be surrounded in heat, especially behind your eyes, or in the bathtub sometimes i sink my head beneath the water and hold my breath so my eyes can feel the heat.... "ooooookay" says sarita like i am in need of serious help. i guess it's just me i shrugged.
later in the tent, we giggled and sarita in her miner's head flashlight just put us over the edge. we played "would you rather ______ or________". led by sarita. most of them had to do with kissing so and so or so and so. i felt like a grade sixer at a sleep over. eventually we started falling asleep. my nose was cold right away, and no matter how far i pulled up the covers or down the hoodie, it was cold all night. and my bum was cold from the cold air in the mattress. everyone had a really cold night and a light sleep. i stayed in one position the whole time because it was impossible to move around on the air mattress without bouncing around. it was messy and i didn't want to do it. h&s made two pee trips, i believe. we didn't wake up unitl 9.
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