The Great Outdoors

There are so many different things that I want to do in my life, as I have posted before, but the one thing that I didn’t put on my bucket list, that I have continuously done is camping. Camping is a rush for me, I love being outdoors and using basic “technologies” that are essential to survival, like starting a fire, cooking over the fire, setting up shelters… it’s all a great part of camping.

Camping when I was younger was a lot different, we had parents to watch over us and tell us what sort of events they planned for us…. And it’s hard to understand how different and how much better camping is when you’ve done it with a group of friends.

My friends from home went camping this summer, at Covered Bridge Campground, North Conway, NH. It was right on the Kancamangus High Way, an awesome and thrilling drive. We had a lot of fun, there are natural water slides at one of the gorges and I believe we spent hours there, just swimming in the heat and going down the slides.

At night we sat by the fire and had a couple of beers, and one night we almost got completely fucked over. We were being pretty rambunctious, and it was after 10:00PM, conveniently enough, when there are quiet hours, yes just like damn dorm life. So of course we have beers in our hand, and one of my friends stands up, we’re not really sure why, but a state police officer comes up to our fire with a park ranger (I think) and asks our friend, “Whatcha hiding there? You wouldn’t be underage would ya?” Our friend awesomely responds, “It’s a Corona…” and gives no answer to the latter, for obvious reasons. I mean we weren’t killing anyone, just a couple of kids having a beer by a fire. Yes it’s a crime but it’s not like we were doing any real harm, other than keeping fellow campers awake.

To void the silence of the awkwardness, the park ranger (I think) quickly asked us if we knew about the bear and if we would clean the food up a bit so the bear wouldn’t bother us.

Now this bear was a cub, and usually with a cub there is a mother bear too, but the cub had been at the site for weeks without the mother, so the camp hosts believed that the mother must have died and the cub was now on its own just looking for food, which Is really kind of cool and too bad.