Really wasn't too bad all things considered.
The GF and I set out for Lost Maples on Friday with the intention of staying overnight and possibly staying a second night if we liked it. Our main motivation for giong was a new telescope I just purchased (dark skies!) and our desire to simply get away. I work from home, so it is hard for me to escape work at all and a weekend out in the boonies sounded pretty nice. We've been planning a Big Bend trip so this would also be a way to find out how much we liked "camping" as opposed to making reservatinos to stay in a lodge during our BB trip.
I had just purchased some gear the night before. The posts on this board helped in the decision making process as did some input from other people I spoke to. We ended up making a trip to Acadamey and purchasing a tent, an air mattress, an ice chest, and varius other items (flashlights, Off, etc etc).
This is the tent we picked out
When I first planned on camping, I figured we could go primitive, but after reading the posts here reccomending not to do that without a backpack we decided to just use the main camping area. In the future I will probably purchase a backpack in order to get into better spots.
We arrived around 6pm on Friday and found out there were only 2 other groups there. The ranger's office already closed so we just picked a spot away from the other groups and pitched our tent. We later found out we put it up incorrect - oops - but it worked just fine. We now know for the future how to do everything right.
We still had about 2 hours of daylight so we set out on the East Trail planning to do as much as possible before it started getting dark. Well, we didn't get very far when the first rumbles of thunder were echoing through the canyon. Zero chance of rain according to the NWS but the clouds were definetly saying something different. We hadn't gotten very far so we just doubled back and took the Maple Trail back.
Well, we got back and got in our tent awaiting the deluge that was sure to come but it never seemed to make it. We got some light rain for a really breif period and nothing else. The wind and the clouds did manage to kick the tempature down quite a bit so all in all it turned out to be a good thing!
At that point, we decided to get the fire going in order to make some dinner. We brought some brats and were planning on just roasting them over the fire as an easy but good dinner. Well, I brought charcoal to build a fire with but left the lighter fluid at home. Oops, again.
There were some small pieces of choped firewood near our campsite, so we gathered those and I eventually got a fire going. We made our brats and ate them very happily. Then we made S'mores. Yum!
When we finished with dinner, the clouds had actually cleared enough to see indeed how dark the skies there were. It was awesome! So we took out the scope and did some stargazing and were blown away.
Unfortunetly, a couple showed up at about 12am and picked the campsite right across from us. There were about 28 empty sites, and they picked the one right across from us. I'll never understand that logic. They were also very loud for the rest of the evening into the weeeeeeeeeeeeeee hours of the monring, but what can you do? I was pretty dissapointed that our isolation was pretty much destroyed due to a lack of comm'on sense.
Anyhow, the next morning we got up and went and paid for our campsite at the HQ. The female ranger talked us into staying another night (it isn't like we needed much convincing, we were enjoying it a great deal even with our new neighbors) so we paid and decided to set out on a hike. We got a good deal of the way up the West Trail when my GF developed a blister. It was also finally starting to get hot, so we decided to head back to camp and check out the local towns for some food and make a day trip to Garner before coming back for the night.
The food in Utopia was great, and the drive to Garner was great, but Garner itself was subpar. Way too crowded for my tastes and way too developed. It was definetly not the atmosphere we wanted so we drove back to LM. The drive back was awesomely senic so the drive was well worth it.
After wading in the Sabinal, we once again had a dinner consisting of Brats and S'mores - we're easy to please the brats were gooooooooood so we had them again!. This time, we were too tired to take advantadge of the beautiful sky and we both passed out quite early.
Woke up this morning and sadly broke camp to come back. We bought some mugs on the way out of the park and promised to be back. I think you guys will read more of my posts soon because it seems as though we have a begining addiction to getting out in these parks. Next weekend we'll be makiing a Sunday/Monday night trip to Enchanted Rock and hopefully within the next month we'll be making a 4 day trip to Big Bend. We're still pretty new at this and we're learning what we need to bring to be set, but so far its been fun.
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