More Camping Success

No joke, we went camping over Thanksgiving weekend and it was awesome!  Everything is extra good while camping.  Hot drinks are great, all of the food you make is so satisfying, and fire is the best.  We were not cold at all in the tent, even though the lows were below freezing.  We have two sleeping bags that zip together 😉 and we took two enormous fleece blanks and sewed them together into a big sack to line the sleeping bag just to beef it up a little bit.

Our fellow campers on this trip included our people, Jenn and Wouter, along with Jenn’s friends from college, Mike and Becca, and Wouter’s little brother Gideon and his wife Genevieve.  Also the dogs: Ziggy, Tom, Tortilla, Simon, and Batdog!

We went to a campground near Portland. (Traffic was awful!)  At this campground, you can’t actually drive your car to the campground so they provide carts to move your crap and, oh boy, did Will and I have a lot of crap.  The trek is about a half mile, which I don’t think is too bad, but Will did most of the pushing and pulling so if you really want to know about it I guess you’ll have to ask him.

The reason why we had so much crap is that we always bring way too much food to these kinds of things, we had never camped this cold before so we brought extra warm things (that actually turned out to be unnecessary) and we brought all the equipment to deep fry a turkey out there in the woods.

You heard right, we deep fried a turkey.  It’s actually pretty dangerous.  Go watch some videos of exploding turkey fryers on Youtube.  I’ll wait…

Welcome back.  Anyway, we knew how dangerous it was so we did a lot of research, watched some instructional videos (thanks Alton Brown!) and took all of the precautions.  The turkey turned out pretty decent.  Remember how everything tastes better when you’re camping?  Everything was delicious.  One of the things I’m thankful for this year is rosemary in mashed potatoes.

(And now pictures Will took of the turkey process!)
Boiling oil

Boiling oil

Fear the oil
Joni scared of boiling oil

Fried turkey
Fried turkey
Fried turkey

Despite the cold, the weather was really lovely.  And by that I mean it was SUNNY, which was a Thanksgiving miracle.  When we weren’t making and eating food, we were just chatting, poking at the fire, petting dogs, or playing games.  There’s this game called Snake Oil, where you try to sell products.  You get cards with random words on them, you choose two and try to describe the product and get someone to buy it.  These people were really good at it.  The laughter started to hurt after a little bit.

There’s just something about fire.  It’s probably the whole heat and light thing.  If you go camping at the end of November, I do recommend bringing a lot of firewood.  We basically had at least a little one going from when we got up to when we went to bed.  It’s so cold and dark away from it.  The feeling of relief I felt whenever I got back to the fire after going to the bathroom in the dark was a little ridiculous.  I’m glad I never had to get out of the tent to go.

I guess packing up and hauling everything back to the car was a real pain.  At least that’s what Will told me because us girls just let the boys do it, while we chatted around our dying fire.  I get a little bummed out at the end of things like this, but I look forward to the next time.  Will got all our crap back in the car and we said goodbye to our people.  Traffic was awful again, but we were glad to get home on Saturday so we would have Sunday to recover.  Then it was back to work on Monday.

(And now some pictures Jenn took that we totally stole:)
Putting turkey in oil

Joni making pizza

Putting wood on the fire

The group

One Comment

Leave a Reply