Waterfalls on the Hike |
Despite Mumpus' interest in camping, she didn't really plan out our adventure that well, and our first stop was set to be somewhere in Franconia Notch State Park. The park is a gorge that runs through two mountains and is split down the middle by I-93 (gotta love America -- let's put the highway in the middle of the most beautiful scenery). The park used to house the Old Man in the Mountain, but he fell down in 2003, so we decided not to check out the nothingness where the Old Man used to be.
Mumpus' favorite mossy stump |
We chose a hike that followed a large stream up the slopes, which was beautiful. We both got pretty hot hiking so when we got back down we changed into our swim suits and went back to swim in the icy waterfall pools of the stream. It was COLD, but it felt great. Grumpus was the real tough and went all the way under. Mumpus just went in up to her shoulders.
It was getting late so we decided it was definitely time to get to our campsite. Since we didn't plan our adventure all that well, once we got to the campsite Mumpus had selected in the White Mountains National Forest, we discovered that there were no vacancies! It was terrible. We retraced our steps and headed back to a rustic looking campsite that had a few vacancies left. We took a site in the meadow, bought some firewood, and headed off to pitch our tent.
Mumpus did not want to buy firewood -- she wanted to collect it -- so after pitching the tent she headed into the woods to prove that spending $10 on wood was stupid. But, contrary to her expectations, there wasn't much good wood to be found -- and she had to cut branches off of live trees to get cooking sticks. Why did we need cooking sticks, you might ask. Well, the reason was that Mumpus had decided that we were going to cook our dinner over an open fire without any pots, pans, fire pokers or tongs.
Grumpus' self-portrait with the fire |
Mumpus thought that we could make do very well with some tinfoil, potatoes, onions, and sausages. We came up with some new rules for camp cooking:
1) If you use foil to cook food, use heavy-duty foil/multiple layers of foil
2) If you use foil to cook food, don't put the foiled food on top of a really, really hot fire. Instead, wait until there are useable coals
3) Corn burns really fast if you put it on the fire.
4) There is a high probability that food cooked on a stick will fall off the stick.
Trying to cook a sausage with a stick |
In the end, we had a burnt, although edible dinner of sweet potato, onion and hot Italian sausage, liberally flavored with Trail Spice (code: dirt, sand and bits of grass). It's possible that dinner was only edible because we split a bottle of red wine, swigging from the bottle, and were pretty drunk by the end of dinner. We ended with several rounds of s'mores, perfectly cooked, and deliciously un-spiced.
The wine helped it down |
Finally, tired of being harrassed, Grumpus woke up and we packed up the tent, and drove to get some coffee.
Beware of the bathroom! |
We left the coffee shop and headed to find a hike somewhere, stopping on the way to play a round of mini-golf at Pirate's Cove. Then we hiked for an hour and ran into the ugliest dog in the world. It looked like a gremlin.
ARRRRRRRR!!!!! |
What a face! |
No comments:
Post a Comment