Our Camping Trip

Every one of our weekends for the past several weekends and every weekend for the next few weekends are reserved and scheduled for some activity or trip… again, busy little bees we are (see Blog from October 14)… so Hubby and I decided to take a little camping trip up to north Georgia this weekend- just the two of us. We got up early Saturday morning, packed up the SUV with camping gear, the hotdogs, the s’mores fixings and the dog and took off for a scenic trip through the beautiful autumn landscape. The traffic up was pretty heavy but the views were wonderful. When we finally found our campground near Hiawassee, the gate was locked with a big Closed sign on it! We couldn’t believe it! The guidebook said they were open until late October… Grudgingly, we referenced our tent camping guidebook and took off east bound toward the town of Clayton. We finally found the campground (which was way down about 5 miles of eerie one-lane dirt roads… I kept whistling the Deliverance tune the entire way)… and lucked up and snagged a nice lot for our camp… and just in the nick of time because a bunch of folks came through after us looking for a place and all were full!





We set up camp as the temperature steadily dropped… we cooked hotdogs on my “telescoping weenie roasters” as Hubby kept calling them and enjoyed the dogs with chili that Hubby found at the store up the road.


When we finally retired to the tent we realized that we had packed two mummy sleeping bags so resorted to sleeping in our own bags each on top of the air mattress… Sampson slept on a makeshift doggie bed on the floor next to us… Well, around midnight we woke up to Sampson pacing the floor at the foot of the air mattress by the front door… now keep in mind that it is freezing in the tent (even though I am warm and snug as a bug in my Mtn Hardware mummy bag)…so Hubby gets up and gets dressed to take him out to do his business… Hubby opens the door (mind you it feels frigid with the door zipped open) and calls for the dog. And do you know what the dog does? He runs up onto our bed and jumps on top of Hubby’s sleeping bag! I think we were both in shock! He just lay down and has the look that says I am staying right here and you cannot make me go outside! So we would up spending the next 10 minutes trying to get Sampson off the bag and maneuvered onto his sheet in between us in our bags and him in the middle… Hubby even covers him with his hooded sweatshirt and his fleece jacket. Well, needless to say, the next 8 hours is spent with me waking up every hour or so with Sampson’s butt in my face or Sampson staring at me or Sampson’s head laying on me or Sampson’s paw on my face! And in between the dogs antics and his shivering and Hubby’s going outside to pee, I could not sleep to save my life! My nose froze all night long too… and being constricted into a cocoon position in that mummy bag did not help matters either… By the time we got up around 8am it was so darn cold in that tent! Yet, we get up and dressed (in layers) and proceed to cook some of the best camp bacon and omelets I have ever eaten… Waffle House has nothing on a Coleman stove and me!

When we start packing up, I notice a strange brown nut on the ground just under the tent footprint… and it is what I thought it was- a buckeye! So I start looking in the leaves and such around our campsite and find a bunch more! We slept under a buckeye tree- how cool!

When we finally got into the truck after packing it all up, the temperature said that it was 37 degrees outside! Yikes, no wonder Sampson shivered all night… poor doggy…