Camping with the parents

This past weekend, we joined my parents for a camping trip in southern Massachusetts to visit Old Sturbridge Village. We had a really good time and we're looking forward to going camping together again, maybe next summer in Acadia National Park.

We were able to leave work at 4 on Friday, and since the car was all packed, we left right from work. We stopped at a Target along the way because I wanted to pick up the second book in the Millenium series, because I was almost finished with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I wanted to pick up a pair of cheap flipflops to use as shower shoes. The Target was in a huge mall compound that included a Best Buy, so James wanted to go in to see the new Droid X phone. So we did. Then we got a call from my parents, and when dad found out that we'd been at a Target, he told me that they'd forgotten pillows and syrup for pancakes. Pillows!! So we went back to Target and bought two pillows, but I forgot to get syrup because my parents, the camping experts, had forgotten pillows. PILLOWS. Sleeping without a pillow is the worst, so that's what I was worried about.

When we arrived at the campground, my parents were already there and just starting to set up camp. It was a private campground, unfortunately, because the state park was all full. I'm not a huge fan of camping in private campgrounds, because they tend to be just big open fields with no division between the sites. I want to camp in the woods. Anyway. It ended up being a site in a big field, but we were at the end so the site had woods on two sides, and the nearest four campsites were empty so it wasn't too bad. We were close to the only bathrooms in the place, too. We were also across the street from the dance hall, which would prove awesome on Saturday night. The site we got was actually not the one that we'd been assigned - that one was in the back, boggy area of the campground (far from the bathrooms), near a fly-infested lake, and all the sites were dirt. My parents drove us back there to show us where we could have been, and we felt super lucky to have our nice grassy site that wasn't swarming with bugs.

We set up camp and wanted to get dinner started, but the sky looked threatening in the distance. I used my weather.com app on my iphone to find out that a pretty nasty thunderstorm was headed our way. The app promised winds of 60 mph and quarter-sized hail, and torrential rain.
Yikes!

Meanwhile, James and I discovered that the pump for our air mattress was dead, even though it had been plugged in all night the night before. He tried charging it for about a half an hour in the bathroom, but it still refused to do anything. We'd flick the switch and nothing, not even a wimper. And we didn't have anything else to pump up the mattress, so it was looking like we'd have to sleep on the hard, hard ground.

Eventually the skies got really crazy and violent-looking, and we started hearing lots of thunder. Just as the storm was right on top of us, we decided to bail on having dinner in camp. We piled into our car and took off just as the rain was starting to fall. I used my trusty iphone to find a restaurant, and the skies opened up minutes after we got inside. It rained like crazy. The restaurant was a hole-in-the-wall barbeque place, but it was really good! We all enjoyed it. And the storm had passed by the time we'd finished, which was nice. Then we went to Walmart to pick up a pump for our air mattress (a hand-operated one, which is good because the powered ones are apparently unreliable, but bad because it takes a long. time. to pump up a (double thickness, yay) queen bed by hand. And my parents got syrup for the pancakes, so all was right in the world.

It was somehow after 10 pm by the time we got back to camp, so we pretty much just went to bed. I had a horrible night's sleep. We were sleeping on a very very slight hill, not even noticable when you looked at it but when we laid down, we felt it. And we were lying downhill. It's so hard to sleep downhill! And the trees overhead dripped big fat drops of water on our tent all night long, even though the rain was long over, so that intermittent drumming overhead made sleep very hard. Oh, and the bed wasn't firm enough, so it was kind of squishy and that didn't help. And I woke up at 4:45 to lots of birds singing with gusto and the sky was bright enough that I thought it was 7 am! I managed to sleep in until 7:30 but oy. It was a rough night!

But I felt remarkably good for having very little sleep, which I think has to do with all the fresh air and the novelty of starting the day outdoors. I let James sleep (he'd had a rought night too) and joined my parents outside, who of course were already up and about. I read my book for a while (I finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and immediately started The Girl Who Played With Fire), and my parents and I had breakfast, and I took a shower. It cost one dime for every two and a half minutes of shower, and I only managed to scrounge up four dimes in my purse (I had a whole mess of nickles and dollar coins, but the machine only took dimes and quarters, of course.) so I had two dimes for me and two for James. The machine was really annoying to figure out, and the shower only offered scalding hot or cold water, so I took a quick, cold shower.

Eventually James woke up, had breakfast and all that, and we went to Old Sturbridge Village. We spent the day walking around the village, poking around the buildings, talking with the townspeople - they dress in the period costume but they're not pretending to be from that time period. They're very knowledgeable and I felt like I could ask them anything about the building they were stationed in, or any of the furniture or decorations, and they'd know the answer. We watched a cobbler demonstrate shoe-making, we saw a woman make a broom using broom corn, we spoke with some farmers tending their crops, we got a tour and lecture in the herb garden (we learned that something growing in our garden, which we rip out because we thought it was a weed, is actually edible), we watched the potter throw a pot, and we got a lesson in the school house. There happened to be a chili cookoff that day, so we got to sample lots of different chilis and vote for our favorites. There was also an ice cream demonstration, which James and I were excited about because we thought it meant we'd get as much ice cream as chili, but it turned out to be just a tiny spoonful. It was neat to see the whisk they used - a bundle of sticks that were tied together at the top. Since we were all in the mood for ice cream after the demonstration, we went across the street and got ice cream cones. Yum! It was a really hot day so it was a nice treat. We went to the general store and my mom got a new floppy straw hat and we convinced my dad to buy us some freshly-baked spice cookies, and we watched some girls dyeing yarn and I fed one of the sheep some wildflowers, which it went crazy for. We didn't see the whole village, or walk into each and every building, but I think we did it justice. We were pretty tired by the end of the day - that heat really takes it out of you.

We went back to the campsite and James and my mom both laid down for naps. I read my book while my dad read the newspaper. James and I made dinner (heated up the barbeque pulled pork I'd made earlier in the week and froze, the canned baked beans and the beets that my mom had cooked at home), and we ate. Sometime during dinner, the music started. Turns out, there was a dance that night in the dance hall, right next to our campsite. It was stinking loud. It gave me a headache, and I was feeling all hot and gross, so James suggested we drive into town to buy some earplugs so that maybe we'd get a better night's sleep. So we did, and being in the quiet, cool car was a godsend. It probably saved me from getting a full-blown migrane. After we got back to camp, we played Scrabble with my parents (I won), the dance finally ended at 11 right as we finished up the game, and then we went to bed.

And we did get a better night's sleep! We woke up once in the middle of the night with a huge clap of thunder and a sudden downpour, but I was able to get back to sleep thanks to the ear plugs muffling the rain. I slept pretty soundly until 7:30 or so, then laid in bed reading my book for a while. I got up eventually and joined my parents, letting James sleep in until 9:30. We all had breakfast together - my dad made yummy peach pancakes and fried eggs - and then we broke camp. We toyed with the idea of going back to Old Sturbridge Village (you get a second day free within 10 days) but the only person who seemed really up for it was my dad. And then breaking camp took a long time, because we had to let everything dry in the sunshine. Luckily it was a hot sunshiney morning, but everything was wet from the middle of the night rainstorm. Then my dad couldn't find his wallet and we spent a good hour looking for it (it was behind the steering wheel, propped up against the speedometer), and by the time that drama was over, no one was interested in going back to the village. Besides, my parents had a 5 hour drive ahead of them. So we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways.

Once we got home, we fed our animals and promptly fell into bed for a nap. We were both so tired! Then we went grocery shopping, and I hopped in the pool to skim it while James watered the gardens, then he picked up a pizza from our neighborhood pizza place. We ate out on the deck, then I got back in the pool to keep cleaning. A little while later, James poked his head out the bathroom window (which looks out over the pool) and asked if I wanted to go see Inception. I was surprised he wanted to see a movie on a Sunday, which is something we never do, but I said of course I'd want to go. The next show was in half an hour, so we quickly got ready and went. I was delighted by the spontaneous nature of the date. The movie was great, too. All in all a lovely weekend.