Camping is always an adventure. And by adventure, I mean tortuous decisions of which comforts to sacrifice. I joke but the purpose of camping; at least to me, is to get out of my comfort zone and see what’s really important. This past weekend we decided to go camping, so I gathered up the equipment while my lovely bride gathered the food. After a couple of hours, everyone is packed and the cars loaded so we headed to the closest state park. When we got there the nice asked if we had reservations. When I answered in the negative, she looked shock, hurt and so very sorry for me. They were all booked up as were all state parks in a 200 mile radius.
Anyone with kids knows you cannot plan too far in advance, so you walk a fine line between losing money and disappointing you children. Undaunted, my courageous partner and I swung into action and made call after call to any and all camping sites we could find on our handle held computer phones. We finally located a spot at Lake Lavon just past Wylie, Tx. We arrived, got out and found the hurricane force winds were going to make this especially challenging.
We unpacked, wrestled the tent up and noticed it had a pretty severe lean in the wind. I found trees close together, so I tied up a tarp to act as a windbreak, took down the tent and put it up again behind my makeshift wall. Now that we felt the tent would not collapse on us, we got all the beds made.
To make this long story less long, I’ll just summarize. Army Corp parks don’t have good bathrooms, teenagers like to talk way into the night, Lake Lavon is a good place to find spiders, 50 mph wind gusts wake me up, I hate air mattresses, always make sure the lights are off in your vehicle.
We had meant to be out for two days, but I found one to be more than sufficient. The best part of the whole things was meeting Joe. He’s a volunteer out there and is the friendliest most helpful person you’ll meet. If you know little about camping, pitch you tent there and feed him a meal and he’ll help you out. He’ll also entertain you with his guitar and harmonica.
