An Interesting Camping Adventure

Fenna called it. She said "going camping is going to be interesting". But, she really wanted to go so Keith planned out a two night trip and we packed up and went. Keith and I both promised that yes indeed, it would be interesting. I believe we were true to our word on that.

We planned a two night tent camping adventure on Mount Palomar just two miles from the observatory. It is a nice beautiful pine tree covered mountain. Lovely!

 
We drove up there and the flies were so terrible that we were all frantically waving our arms around our heads after a minute. We walked around a bit and decided that we wouldn't be able to cook or enjoy ourselves with the fly population so hungry for us. They acted like we were the biggest and best turds who ever set foot on the mountain! After 10 minutes, we were done and headed back down the mountain to a campground closer to town near a lake.

We were going camping with our friends, the Block family and their dogs and when they called and said there were too many flies in the campground I thought, "oh he's exaggerating."  Unbelievable!

We ended up at Lake Skinner, a nice lake that you cannot touch. It is illegal to touch the water because the pollution from your human body might be harmful to the fish. The fish have the same view of us that the flies do.  This is the event site of the Temecula Balloon and Wine Festival, and the site of the new splash pad where I took the kids a few weeks ago. This might be good.

This campground is only 20 miles from town. It took us over 3 hours to get there after going up to Palomar Mountain, back down, stuck in traffic on the freeway, across town and out the other side. The kids were sick to death of being in their carseats. They sensed it was taking way too long to get to our campsite. These kids of mine are geniuses!

The original plan was that we would leave the house at 1pm, go set up camp and then I would bring the girls back to town for their swimming lesson class and head back up. Well.... that didn't happen. We left around 2:30 and arrived at our campsite at nearly 6pm. Swim lessons were pretty much over by then. They missed the first lesson of this new session, oh well.

Lake Skinner campground is nice enough, but they don't have tent spaces. The camping spots are designed for RVs and it's set up like a parking lot. There were other tent campers there too, but like us, they had to set up on a hard packed dirt pad.

We set up our campsite on the tiny pad that was our assigned camp spot and got to work with cooking dinner. Things were looking up! As long as there is food, there will be happiness, right? Right! I made Dollywood Potatoes over the propane burner.

Fenna was very worried about the size of the tent. She mentioned it a million times and we kept telling her that it was a 4-person tent but it would hold all of us and the dog fairly comfortably. She knew that if it was a 4-person tent, it was really a 2 or 3 person tent. She was pleasantly surprised when we popped it up!  We set up the little girls' tent too, just for fun (and elbow room since Fenna sleeps like a starfish).

The tent campers in the next parking, er, camping row were loud. We got to hear some very colorful language and dogs barking all evening and into the wee hours of the morning. At least they were happy people. Loud happy inebriated campers.

Our friends camped in their luxurious hotel on wheels.  They had a bathroom, running hot water, electricity, tv and internet. The probably slept great too.

I couldn't sleep. We finally laid down in our tent around midnight. We kept waiting for the campground to settle down and become somewhat quiet, but that wasn't happening so we caved and tried to sleep through the racket. Finally, around 2am, a little Spanish lady yelled "Would you please be quiet! Thank you!" There is something about the voice of a little Spanish lady that scares people. It worked too, the entire campground was dead silent after that.  Lady, I thank you.

Keith and Fenna slept great. Sandy slept with us in our tent but she was all over me, laying on my legs, then pushing up against me, stealing my blanket, and then she ended the night by sleeping on my pillow. She's going into the pink tent next time!

At one point, I forgot who was sleeping where and I thought Fenna was Keith, but she was in her own sleeping bag so I was very confused. I thought I stole all the blankets off of him so I patted her down thinking she was Keith, and I just wanted to know if he was cold laying there without any blankets. Then I was grabbing her wrist to see his watch to find out what time it was. She wasn't cold, had no watch on, and wasn't Keith. She let me know it too. Whoops.

I wasn't comfortable at all. I tried and tried to sleep and I was dead tired, but I just laid there on the hard ground with my eyes wide open. I slept on and off from 2ish until nearly 5am and then I was awake for the day. I think I got 3 hours of sleep with 23 wakings in there, it was ridiculous! Around 5:30, I decided to quit trying and I just got up.

Gracie woke up a little before 5am and she said, "I wish I had some tape so I could tape up those birds."  Keith was making gun noises while looking at the door of the tent. She is her father's daughter.


After heating up the tea kettle for some instant coffee.. I wandered the campground and my husband took some great photos while I snapped some sand-spotted pictures to start the day. We were going to need some decent photos to pretend the camping trip wasn't a complete failure.

It was great to wake up so early and see hot air balloons! (Can I say I woke up if I never really slept?) They were off in the distance but we were able to see them well enough, even through the morning fog. It was a lovely way to start the day! We saw three balloons in the sky. Very pretty.  Keith saw a chicken hawk too. He thinks that's why the birds were going crazy around 4am; the chicken hawk had breakfast.

The kids had a lot of fun playing in their pajamas on their scooters and on the playground. Then we went for a walk to the untouchable lake.  The water is used as a public water source, so fish and waterfowl can poop in it but we can't dip our toes in. Libby's feet stunk so bad she would have killed the fish anyway. Those polka-dot shoes are almost 2 years old and she loves them, but they smell horrid.

The walk to the lake was nice. The fog lifted and the sun came out and heated things up pretty quickly.  It was still fairly early so the splash pad was not operating yet, which was fine by me. The kids were disappointed though. I promised them we'd come back another day when it's working. I didn't bother to inform them that the water turns on at 10am. They don't need to know everything.

Now that it was nearly 10am, we'd come to a unanimous decision that we were done camping. We had lunch (hey, breakfast was 5 hours earlier), took down the tents, packed up the gear and drove the short distance home. We were home at 11:15am.  So much for our planned two nights of camping, we camped for 16 hours.

After such a short campout, there is still a ton of cleanup to do after arriving home! The van doors were open most of the time in the evening, and the smoke from the fire went into the van stinking up the whole works. I have to rug dr the interior now. Joy.  Camping in dirt makes everything dirty. I'm still cleaning from our little excursion.

The first thing we all did when we got home was to ask ourselves, "Am I more tired then dirty or more dirty than tired?"  We all decided we were filthy but more tired, so we slept. Everyone slept four or five hours. Apparently I wasn't the only one who didn't sleep well in our parking spot!

Now that this interesting camping adventure is over, I can honestly say that I have RV envy.