Bento Box

Saturday the pharm gang and I went to Western Washington to do some car camping at Olympic National Park. Lauren and Heather called it “break-in camping,” aka “pop-your-cherry-camping,” since Pat, Sherri, and I never been camping. My fears of being eaten by a bear were assuaged when I discovered how populated the area was and how there were many amenities.

We drove to Edmonds port to take the ferry over to Kingston to continue our drive over to the park. We first stopped at Hurricane ridge, a popular tourist spot to do a quick hike and check out the area. I never understood the lure of National Parks as a tourist destination. Entire families would come to see the view of the surrounding mountains, take some pictures, buy some sweatshirts with “Olympic National Park” imprinted on the front and then leave. Maybe when I’m older I’ll get the strange desire to visit random high altitude places to take pictures.

After a short hike we made our way to the campsite located on the far side of Lake Crescent. Very blue and clear lake. Heather said it was partly due to the lack of certain organisms (the green inducing kind?) because of the pH of the water or something…not sure; I asked her more questions but the subject just ended up on my “to-research list.” Ask.com had the answer. The campsite was almost full when we arrived-lots of families. The site was more like a winding parking lot in the forest with each large parking spot having enough room for two cars, a picnic table and a fire pit. There were even restrooms and running water around. I was pleasantly surprised by all the nice amenities.

After setting up, we went for a walk around the lake. We saw some people skinny dipping, but I didn’t have the balls to whip out the camera. I did see side-boob though. They later turned out to be hippies when they asked us for help to push their VW bus out of the soft dirt. We worked up a good sweat and jumped in the lake to freshen up.
Just like what happened with camping at Sasquatch, we didn’t bring enough activites to do (except at Sasquatch we didn’t bring anything to do so we had to sit in the tent, in the rain, doing nothing). We played around with the guitars for awhile, and then Lauren got a little inebriated and started sharing dance moves with Sherri and Heather. They learned to do the “backtrack,” and the “running man.” 1994 was replaying right in front of my eyes.

Smores and snores later, we packed up our stuff and headed back to Seattle. Sunday was the hottest day of the year so far and Pat and I chose to stupidly roast in the sun playing tennis. Overall, camping wasn’t that bad, not my all-time favorite activity, but also not at the bottom of my list. Would have been nice to get intoxicated of another sort and just chill and indulge in a munchie-induced marshmallow and cheetos feast. If I had put a freq cap on camping, I’d probably say twice a year, during either summer/spring/fall. I did end up with a luxurious chair and a killer headlamp out of the adventure though.