Camp rocks :)

Since I have already given you a clue about this in my last post, I don't think I have to mention that no, this post is not going to be about the teen movie :-p. After 3 years, we went on a camping trip. It was obviously Snugli's first camping trip, unless you count the fact that the last time we went I was pregnant ;-).

Well, the story happened on 13th August, Friday, that too pretty late in the day. We have been planning to go camping right since the start of summer, but something always came up (its funny how things always come up in summers and there's absolutely nothing to do in winters :-p). That day we faced a tug of war between going and not going. The weather was predicted to have rains in the night and camping is certainly not fun with thunderstorms (well, I disagree, but I digress :-D). When we checked at about 6Pm in the evening, the weather prediction had miraculously (yup, I am being sarcastic :-p) changed to clear skies :-D. After a little bit of to and fro, we simply decided to get going.

Packed up all we needed, bought the rest and got to the Lake Kincaid park (where we camped 3 years ago). We liked having the lake right next to the camping sites and thought that with Snugli around, the place would be a known devil scenario :-D. Plus the place has proper restrooms (albeit a bit far from the camping site). We were able to find a site (without advance booking) and started setting up stuff. Everything was smooth except that there were clouds near the horizon and it got dark pretty fast.

It was amazing how we put the tent together in a matter of minutes (another thing you never forget once you learn how :-p).




It was a little too dark to get stuff ready for cooking in the fire, but that part was manageable. The parts that weren't were the heat (it wasn't pleasant in any way) and Snugli's bewilderment. She was not really scared, just that being outside in almost total darkness with the sweltering heat was a strange experience for her. There were a few times when she hung onto me and refused to let go. But I did manage to distract her with the stars (that was one of the reasons we went - for me to try and photograph stuff ;-) :-D) and chirpy cricket sounds :-D. We somehow managed to eat up our usual camp diet of roasted corn, roasted veggies, roasted panneer and roasted burgers in the dark (we made a note of lanterns as things to buy for the next camp trip :-D). Later pumped up the bed and settled down for the night.

Or Sri and Snugli did ;-). I got up at around 2 AM to first catch some more meteors if possible (I saw around 25 meteors on the previous night, but no photos since I don't really have a lens wide enough top cover the entire sky :-\) and photograph the dark non-light-polluted skies. I did catch about 5 meteors, but again no snaps. It was literally Murphy's law :-p. So presenting the Deepthi's corollary to Murphy's law -

"If your camera is pointed to a specific part of the night sky, then the probability of meteors appearing in that particular area is much much much lower (almost close to 0) than that in the rest of the sky".

Sad, but true :(. Anyways I did manage to capture some pretty pics including this one of the Pleiades star cluster and emerging dawn (click to enlarge) :).




And one of Jupiter, the biggest "star" in the pic below (Before you jump to correct me, I know its a planet :-p).




I did take lots and lots of snaps (I think I was up for more than 2.5 hours! But the thing is without a tracking mount (which is helpful in contradicting earth's rotation), the only way to take good pics is by taking multiple short exposure photos (minimum 25 of each object!). I still haven't gotten to the post processing of images, so maybe will get back once I do :).

Went back to bed and got up after 8:30 AM :). After finishing our morning ablutions, Snugli got to play in the playground for a while..




And then we had breakfast at camp (yeah, I took the photo with a timer, had to run to and fro from the tripod :-p)..




Snugli enjoyed the morning camp much much more than the earlier evening (she surprisingly slept well and didn't fuss at all in the night). Here's her posing from the tent..




We then proceeded to dismantle the camp and head home :). All in all the trip was pretty much a success. It was great that the adventure lamp is still burning brightly within us and Snugli enjoying most of it was a bonus :). And photographically, it was another successful experiment :). Here are 2 daytime snaps I am pretty proud of :).







Very much looking forward to camping once again before winter sets in :).

Camping Continued..

I said we'd go camping again and so we did on 10th August 2007. This time to the Natural Bridge State Resort Park. We had been to the park 2 years ago, when we enjoyed trekking to the actual bridge and various points and also tried the sky-lift they had. I thought I had written a post on that then, but we trekked so much that year that probably I had no patience to write posts on them ;-). Anyways this time we didn't go anywhere near the bridge (which is a huge sandstone arch) or the sky-lift. Just went to the campgrounds in the evening, booked a campsite and put the tent.




We didn't even have to use the instruction manual for the tent this time :-D.




As usual, we took a nice stroll around (there is no lake around but the area is almost like a forest), gathered a few kindling sticks (we had bought firewood earlier) and later had a campfire. Sadly, the campfire didn't really turn out to be as roaring as we expected it to be (must be because it had rained a bit the previous day and so the wood might have not been all that dry :-\). Anyways, we were able to roast our corn cobs and later roast the veggie pattis without any problems.

I rubbed the roasted corn cobs with lemon, salt and corriander chutney and they were ready to eat! Yummmm..




The pattis were also ready in a matter of time (as soon as we had gobbled up the corn cobs :-D)..




Soon veggies were cut and the pattis became a part of the Veggie burgers (and soon landed in our stomachs :-D) :)).




We sat in front of the fire for some time and later took another walk around. It was a really beautiful night with a clear sky and billions of stars visible. And I just love the night sky without the moon. Its such a lovely sight :). Still later, we retired for the night. This time, thankfully, our air pump worked fine, so soon the air bed was almost like a real bed. We had also taken pillows, so were able to have a good night sleep :).

Morning, we packed up the tent and left. And so another camping adventure came to an end..

How to Camp - US style!

Camping in India is wayyyyy wayyyy different from how its done in the US. Yeah the tent and the campfire are same, but everything else is totally different.

Firstly, the campgrounds are usually accessible to roads and each site even provides a car parking! This is unless you are determined to go into a forest, trek a bit and then camp. Thats the only situation where you need to do donkey work. Otherwise, your car will carry everything. So whats advantageous is that you can stuff all necessary as well as unnecessary stuff and take it along :-D. Also since its accessible to road, you can get firewood, fuel and even ready-made food if you don't want to cook in open fire ;-).

Secondly, you get camping accessories of all sorts. One major example is a air-filled bed! In India, the couple of times I went trekking, we hardly had blankets to sleep on. Here a bed is almost mandatory :-D. You get a pump which needs to be charged before and all you do is place the bed in tent and pump it up :-D. You also have camp chairs, battery-lanterns, coolers (for cold drinks), fire-grills, gas-powered grills (if you don't want to cook directly on the camp-fire) and people actually use these! Believe me, I've experienced it when we had been river-rafting.

Thirdly, you can rent a campsite in which water/power outlets are provided! These make much sense here as people own trailers which they bring to campgrounds to enjoy the "camping" experience! Worse, this time I actually saw Television sets and even dish antenna receivers on a few campsites!! Looks like the definition of camping is not what I thought it was :-p. Camping and luxury go hand in hand here.

Lastly, the most important are the restrooms! Most of these campsites come with pretty good restrooms, which also have showering facilities! Personally, I like this luxury, but again its not "camping" according to me ;-). Well, who am I to protest when facilities are available :-D!

Coming to my story now (finally :-p). We have been wanting to go camping for a while now. We had bought the equipment (tent, camp chairs and bed ofcourse :-D) last year itself, but never got around to going camping. After dilly-dallying away half the summer, we finally managed to go on 30th June 2007.

Since this is a how-to story, here are the steps to successful camping:

1) Buy equipment:

To camp you need a tent. As I said before, this does not change no matter where you are. Choosing a tent is pretty important. You have to carefully judge the height/width you require. Also you sometimes get good deals ;-). Rest are optional. But camp chairs and an air-bed are good to have :).

2) Buy food and accessories:

Depends on what kind of food you eat. Since we are vegetarians, we carried corn cobs, veggie patties (Indian store ones, as I have said numerous times the American store ones taste like rubber tyres :-p), burger buns, various veggies for the burger and for grilling (like onions, capsicums, tomato, cucumber and lettuce), panner and lemons. We also carried paper plates, water, knives and grilling accesories (to roast the corn/patties). And yeah, you need firewood if you plan a campfire. But usually firewood is available at the campsites.

3) Book a campsite:

If you are in US, another advantage is that you can book a campsite online. But you need to do this atleast 2 days in advance. We didn't do it in advance but drove straight to Kincaid State Park (which is about an hour's drive away). Thankfully they did have some spots available. We were ready to come back if there weren't any.

4) Put up the tent:

Well, if you want to sleep, then you need a tent. Unless you want to sleep in the car. That experience will not be camping but car-ing :-p. The instruction manual is usually available with the tent, so the main thing is to follow the instructions ;-).

The first step is to spread the tent on the ground.




The second step is to take the long curved rods provided (these will be a collection of small sized rods whcih you have to join to form a bigger rod) and insert them diagonally to the top portion of the tent and fasten them. This helps in raising up the tent like this:




The next step is to fix the roof (this will have smaller rods similar to above) to the top of the tent. The final step is to attach hinges to the floor of the tent and hammer them to the ground so that the tent cannot move (slide off or blow away due to heavy winds if any :-p). Finally the tent looks like this:




And this is how the entire campsite looked like after putting up the tent:




Note that it has ample space to park the car, place the tent, space for a campfire, camp chairs and a wooden picnic table :).

5) Enjoy the surroundings:

Once the tent was up, we took a stroll around. Our campsite was almost next to the lake.




And the lake was absolutely beautiful. We sat near the lake for sometime before sunset (Sunset currently is at 9 PM :-p) and later returned to the camp.




6) Make a campfire:

Now that the living quarters is taken care of, next thing to worry about is food. For food, you obviously need a campfire. So better start off early and get the fire hot enough to cook food. The equation is simple:

Firewood + some starter fuel + matches = FIRE!!

We already had the starter fuel as we do some vegetarian barbeques sometimes. So Sri, with some amount of help from me in arranging the firewood (well actually I also gathered some wooden chips and sticks to start off the fire :-D), successfully had the fire going.




7) Cook the food and enjoy:

As I said, we roasted corn, grilled veggies and later grilled burger patties and had a comfortable meal (didn't really take photos :-\). Moreover since we had some cool drinks in place, it was nice to have in the hot weather. We put some soft music in the SUV and basically enjoyed sitting in front of the fire :).

8) Get the tent ready for the night:

Two important things here - one, don't forget to take pillows and two, make sure the air pump for the air bed is funtioning and recharged. We didn't do both and had to struggle a bit. Sri did recharge the pump for 2 hours, but it wasn't enough (its supposed to be recharged for atleast a day). The air bed was almost flat by the time the pump gave out, so to say the least, the bed wasn't comfy at all. Another important thing is to find how the waether will get in the night. For us, though we had taken blankets, it got really cold in the night, so we could have done with a couple of extra sheets ;-).

Morning, we had a breakfast of croissants, packed up the tent and left. The camping was only for a night, but it was worth it. It was basically a relaxing time without TV/Computer/internet :-D. Well, we all need come time away from the gadgetry :).

We are planning to go camping again probably this weekend. And yeah this time, the air pump has been replaced and checked :-D, so hopefully there'll be no further troubles :).