Camping

This past week we went camping. We went to a provincial park called Echo Valley, where we camped a couple of years ago. When we went the first time, it was insanely busy, and very noisy. Despite that, it was a nice park, and we decided to go back on a weekday trip.

The campground was almost completely empty when we arrived, and we were quite pleased knowing that it would be very quiet. However, when we arrived at our site we were greeted by hordes of tent caterpillars, and the ground and picnic table were covered with little black dots which were tent caterpillar poop. I had heard that they had been bad at campgrounds this year, so I was sort of prepared for it, but I find tent caterpillars to be pretty gross. I had to just keep thinking of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and reminding myself that caterpillars are cute.

The major problem for me was that they sometimes fall out of trees and land on you. So you never know when a tent caterpillar might show up on your leg or on the back of your neck. But through all of this I was trying to put on a brave face and suck it up because it is rare that we get away from basically all people and have a chance to enjoy quiet and nature. By the time we were roasting marshmallows by the fire, I was getting into the whole camping thing.

Maren was a great little camper. She loved the tent, enjoyed watching the caterpillars crawling, and generally didn't make camping much harder (other than the fact that one of us had to hold her constantly, because we couldn't set her on the ground for fear of her eating a tent caterpillar).

When we have gone camping here in the past, every single time I have woken up hot. We have sleeping bags that are made for camping in the mountains of Oregon, and here it never really gets that cold overnight. So I thought I was really smart when I suggested that we leave our sleeping bags at home, and just bring a thin blanket. Unfortunately, even though it wasn't very cold, I ended up being freezing and not sleeping well. At some point Maren no longer wanted to be on her own little foam pad, and joined us on the air mattress. Having her sleeping right next to me always makes it hard to sleep, but I was having an extra hard time sleeping because I was cold.

Then, at 5 AM I was awake to nurse Maren, and I found a tick attached to my arm. I was pretty well freaked out, but remained calm, woke Jeff up, and got some help from him in removing the tick. I had a serious case of the heebie-jeebies, so I started inspecting the rest of my body for ticks, and I found another one attached to my leg. At that point, I was done. Even though we were supposed to stay for another night, when Jeff said we could go home early, I said sounds good. I felt like a bit of a wimp for not sticking it out, but when we left that day, we were literally the only people in the entire campground. No one else was camping with the tent caterpillars and ticks either.

Fortunately, the ticks here don't carry Lyme disease, and also fortunately, Maren didn't get bitten (and neither did Jeff). But I didn't particularly care about that, I just wanted to get the heck out of there before things got worse.

We didn't take any photos while camping except one after we decided to leave. Maren was apparently ready to drive home by herself if we didn't take her there:

Actually, she was perfectly happy to keep camping, and would have been fine sticking around. We have another trip planned for August, and by then the tent caterpillars will definitely be gone, and hopefully the ticks will be less prevalent. By then the mosquitoes should be pretty bad, but honestly I would take mosquitoes over tent caterpillars and ticks any day :-)