Fail

This weekend we planned to go to the state forest (it's about 15 minutes from our house) late Saturday afternoon, do some hiking, BBQ, spend the night and head home in the morning. Most of that went down according to plan.

We arrived and set up our tent and all our stuff and then headed off with the dogs for a 4 mile hike. Legend thought this was great, especially getting to play in all the creeks we crossed-she loved sprinting around and flopping and playing in the water. Zodiac was slightly less impressed but did seem to have a good time and cooled off by laying down in all the creeks. Legend actually seemed a little tired when we got back to the campsite.

Back at camp we had a yummy dinner with some good BBQ and then the dogs relaxed with some treats while we watched the sun set and all the bats fly around. Zodiac even spotted an armadillo wandering across the trail.

As it got dark we headed into the tent for the night-that's when things started to go downhill. We had not brought the pad to place on the ground and the three blankets I brought didn't do much to cushion the hard ground at all. Then, the bugs were super loud-I generally like to have the windows open at night in the nice months of the year and don't mind the sounds of nature but this was pretty intense. Plus the campgrounds are close enough to the highway to hear all the traffic and every loud truck that came through sounded like it was going to come plowing through the weeds into the campground. And there was of course the occasional mysterious and unidentified animal sound. So now we were hot, uncomfortable, a little spooked, and unable to sleep with all the noise. About 10:15 as we laid there awake and a little miserable we had that "I don't need to stay if you don't want to" conversation and decided to pack it up and go home to a soft bed, cool, quiet house, and hot shower. And it was worth it.

We'd try camping again, but perhaps under better circumstances.