Camping 101

Last night we (Jerika, Marina, Emily, Kimi, Bridget, Cameron (jerika's brother), Andrew (his friend), Joe and Jameson) took a trip up to Whiting Campground, up by Mapleton, and set up camp. It was certainly an interesting and different experience than the usual "camping in style" and being waited on hand and foot by mom. Marina, Emily and the Terry sisters' mom put together some deluxe tin foil dinners that included everything you could imagine: hamburger, red onions, green onions, celery, lil smokeys, potatos, carrots and I'm sure there was more. I quickly realized that I was the most experienced camper out of the bunch as I took over preparing the charcoals and arranging and checking on the dinners--either that or I was just the hungriest out of the bunch. This first picture is of me checking the tin foil dinners--they were most delicious I must say. Although I didn't have mom there to bring out the camping bins with a list of anything and everything we may need, I was impressed by the preparation that Marina and Emily put together. We had plenty of food and utinsels to last us.
We spent the majority of the night setting up tents, preparing food and eating the food. There were a couple rounds of psychiatrist and some bear stories...apparantly there are bears in the area so we had to be extra cautious in making sure there wasn't any food left out when we went to bed. Oh speaking of bed, setting it up was a most enjoyable experience. Jerika and I got banned to the two person tent while the rest of the girls were in the much larger, luxurious tent. About the time I was getting sleepy it had occurred to me that I had not yet set up my bed. Jerika and I busted out the new air matress, stuck it into the tent and began blowing it up with the pump. This pump was a real joy. It had little to no power and barely pushed any air in at all. We decided to leave it for awhile and went and had some mallows and hung out. After about a half hour we mosied on back over there to check on how our precious bed was doing--it wasn't doing well. It had air in it, but it had gotten to the point where the pump just wasn't powerful enough to push any more air into it. We laid on it to see how it felt and our bums hit the ground. I decided to take to blowing it up with my gigantic lungs. I couldn't take my mouth off the nozzel thing though because the air would just go back out, so I had to breath in through my nose (my stuffy nose that is) and blow out through my mouth. After awhile and feeling as though I would pass out at any second, the mattress finally felt firm enough. It actually got to be pretty firm, and I had a great sleep. It was surprisingly warm for a canyon and I kept plenty warm with just a blanket on top of me throughout the night.

The clean up the next morning was rather funny. It pained me to roll up a tent without wiping it off each roll, but apparantly, as Jerika says "We're camping, it's supposed to be dirty". I looked around for the small broom and dustpan then realized that maybe that was just a Morris thing. I was grateful for my camping experience as the tent set up and take down was rather simple. This last picture was after the bear stories and Jerika and Kimi found it necessary to make bear claws. I told the story of the little girl who was chased by a bear and lost her pants. I'm not a very good story teller and the story somehow came out funny instead of spiritual. After I finished telling the story someone asked "Wait, why was this story in the friend?" and it was then that I realized I had left out the whole praying part and the only thing I could remember is her pants falling off. That became the joke of the night.

Camping was a whole lot of fun even though it was mostly just eating and watching the fire burning....but that's the best part.