Weekend in the woods

First of all, a big THANK YOU! for all of your positive comments last week after I finished my exam! And thanks, also and especially, for all of your encouragement while I was studying!
The camping trip was wonderful. The preparations were a bit crazy, taking most of Thursday. We, for example, had to set up our tent for the first time, which we did in the living room, vastly confusing the little cats.

Friday started out beautifully, sunny, not too hot. Coffeeboy and I set up our tent and went for a nice hike up hills, across streams, and through the woods. It felt so good to be out of doors, not studying, just enjoying the world in a way that I really don't do enough.

We cooked food on sticks over the campfire, ate plenty of s'mores, had some beer and wine, and enjoyed being with people who we don't get to see nearly enough. Saturday (Coffeeboy's birthday), we went on a short hike in the morning to Bash Bish Falls (which everyone kept calling Bish Bash Falls, for some reason), passing by an amazing set of cairns in the stream that ran down from the falls.





Saturday afternoon and evening it began to drizzle. Not a lot, but enough to make us rethink plans time and time again, and also explaining the lack of carefully-posed knitting pictures. Coffeeboy and I took another hike, protected from the rain by the tree cover above. In the evening, the former Girl Scouts in the group discovered that despite having done scouting on different coasts of the country, we shared more than cookies: we all had the same method of making tinfoil dinners and had all had the girly experience of making "sit-upons," or little pads we could tie around the waist so that when we sat down, we'd have something to "sit upon."

The rain kept coming down, and I managed to snap a few fireside photos before we put up the umbrellas and deserted our lively campfire for a covered area with picnic tables.

Overnight, the rain really came down hard, thundering on the roof of our tent and its rain fly. I kept reaching out to touch the corners of the tent to see if it was wet. It wasn't. I'm not sure what this did except keep me awake and worried; if it had been wet, there wouldn't have been anything I could do about it, not when it was thundering and pouring out.

Sunday morning, wet, damp, and muggy, last night's rain dripping from the trees, we packed up our soggy campsite and headed for a nearby diner, where they seated the 11 of us in several booths and brought out heaping plates omelets, coffee, and pancakes. Happily fed, we got in our cars and headed home, tired but full of what, for me, were pleasant memories and a very fervent desire to go camping again.

I'll be taking some time over the next few days to work on the blog layout, design, etc. This post represents my first experiment with Flickr (as opposed to blogger's very slow photo uploader!), so let me know if things look amiss.