Camping Blind
The wife and I spent the weekend playing with our camper. After a few laborious twists and turns needed to back it around our chimney, through the fence, and into the back yard on Friday night, we were more than ready to spend both Saturday and Sunday first playing with and then packing our new toy. It’s almost ready to go, and so are we.
The problem is we aren’t so sure where — exactly — to go. Don’t get me wrong. We’ve been exploring our options. We spent some internet time searching for destinations close by. We spent our final hour or so of the RV show, perusing a corridor of campground cubicles.
But a pamphlet or website only tells you so much. The good stuff is in bright letters. The negatives are left for fine print. A pamphlet won’t tell you how close the campsites are. A good pamphlet won’t mention the junkyard next door or that funny odor that comes from campsite T8. It surely won’t mention sinks or the bathroom floors, much less the nasty thing that crawls out of the toilet after midnight.
It’s hard to get a good feel for a temporary place of residence from three shiny pages. We want to know the kind of crowd the place attracts. We want to know if we are more likely to be running from a bear or running from a square dance.
We know of a couple of sure things. We already have reservations at Granite Hill in Pennsylvania. We’ve been there twice, both under the protection of my brother-in-law’s camper. It’s a nice place with a great family atmosphere. There is plenty to do and that doesn’t even count the Civil War town of Gettysburg that it borders.
Rocky Gap State Park is also high on the list. We’ve been there a couple of times under a tent. Lake Habeeb provides a nice place to swim, boat, and fish and the park itself is about the perfect distance from Baltimore. It gets just enough mountains between you and the city.
Other possibilities include Elk Neck State Park on the Chesapeake Bay, where we were treated to a weekend of rain last time out, and Greenbrier State Park, a place we’ve visited several times but have never bothered to spend the night. Other than that, we are largely in the dark with respect to camping choices and we are anxiously campaigning both friends and family for promising choices.
Probably the most important factor in our decision making is distance. Distance to the wife and I is now measured in the number of hours we believe we can keep little Cambell happy. He’s a good trooper in the car but every child has their limits. Spurts of about 2 hours at a time is probably expecting a little too much from him, without a good nap sometime in the middle. We know we can hit three hours without incident. That’s been proven. This year, we plan to stretch that number quite a bit. Still, a trip to the Grand Canyon is out.
I know I’ll have fun visiting some of the local, and semi-local sites around us but at least once (and, hopefully, more than once) we need to use our toy to do something entirely new. Niagra Falls has been brought up in conversation. A trip South is not entirely out of the question.
We expect to tour the surrounding countryside quite a bit this spring, summer, and fall and I’m looking for suggestions. Send some in, if you would. The rainy weather of this weekend may have temporarily soured my camping spirits but spring is on its way. Pretty soon I’m going to feel all dressed up with no place to go.
