Our first trip to the mountains (Grindstone Recreation Area) with Roxy. Celebrating Lisa & Steve's first anniversary with a long weekend and a bike trip down the Creeper trail.
A few really important points to emphasize:
- Towing in the mountains is really scary
On the way up, Rusty tried to overheat. He failed because we turned the heater on high and sweated bullets until the engine compartment cooled back down.
Eight percent may not seem steep, but when you're towing 3,500 lbs. up an 8% grade for 4.5 miles, it is!
On the way down, I was completely certain that someone would hit their brakes in front of us, our brakes would catch fire and fail, Roxy would overtake Rusty, and we'd all tumble to our deaths the rest of the way to the bottom.
But, nothing bad actually happened!
- Damascus/Abingdon is a gorgeous area with beautiful weather, even in July!
- If my DH gives you $6 for firewood at the Ranger station and you say, "We'll bring it over in 5 minutes" (and I'm waiting for the wood because the evening's plans require a campfire), but instead, over an hour passes and we haven't seen hide nor hair of you, I will march around looking for you until I find you. And if you say, "We must've just forgot" when I remind you that we paid for firewood you said you'd deliver, I will ask you out loud to "unforget." And you will bring me 3 bundles of firewood instead of the 2 my DH originally purchased.
I admit, I was more furious than the situation warranted, but only a little. And I guess that was more of a sub-story than something that sould been included in a list of "important points to emphasize." But we did get the extra firewood out of the deal.
Saturday night, Lisa made shrimp and pasta salad which was too much of a carb-fest for me, so I had a Caesar bag salad with pre-cooked chicken. Not our most extravagant meal effort, but tasty and easy.
All four of us ate at Roxy's dinette (thanks to the torrential downpour) which was actually a lo of fun. It was the first time we'd had dinner guests in the camper!
Bedtime shortly after dinner... I really wish we had a TV.
Lisa had a new recipe for beer cheese dip on the campfire and we ate about seven gallons of it on various dip-hoding foods.
And then, the napping and hammocking ensued.
Rick & I did the dinners on Sunday: steaks and veggie packs ion the fire. There wasn't enough room on the rate for all the foot at once (which, next time we will check before we start loading food into the flames), so we had a multi-course meal and nobody complained.
Monday: Creeper Trail Day
It's a 17-ish mile section down a mountain... used to be a train track? Something like that. The
(Nobody wants to bike 17miles up a mountain, you know!)
In about 35 cramped, awkwardly silent minutes, we said goodbye to the chauffeur (his name was not Jeeves, but I pretended), and we headed off, down the trail wearing backpacks full of picnic lunches. It was 70F, sunny, breezy, and frankly amazing. Lots of especially picturesque ridges, lots of little scenic pull-offs (for we Adventure Selfie addicts), lots of time spent ambling back to our car.
Lisa made tacos for dinner. I contributed some Spanish rice and we did a little more chatting. Then we closed the book on another great day.
Another important point of emphasis: Regardless of photos on Pinterest, cooking eggs on a campfire in hollowed-out orange halves is a fiasco begging to happen. It takes forever to set up. It's messy AF, even by my standards. And it takes the same amount of time as. And at the end of all that... it tastes bad.
(OTOH... Pillsbury cinnamon rolls cooked on the fire encased in hollowed-out orange peels is delicious.)
We packed up after breakfast, wished Lisa and Steve a happy anniversary, hitched up, and headed out (at least, partly, to find something more to eat!).