Camping Expericance

I think the weather is sentient, and I don't think it likes campers.

Myself and a group of friends, making six of us, decided to go camping for one night in the Lakes when another plan fell through. It's been rainy all over England this week but in the Lakes it's always rainy. Unless it's snowing of course.

But the weather was nice enough to only give us rain in periodic showers so in the gaps we could run about and get sorted, in-between. So, we got the the site near Ullswater where we stopped at the farm to pay to stay for the night...guess how much we had to cough up?
£15! Each!
For one night! Okay, I have neglected to say that £10 of that was "quiet deposit" but still, I had only brought £30 with me, and £10 had already gone for food and petrol so I was left with £5, which I do not like. What would we do if something went wrong and we needed money? Ah well what ever, we paid and managed to get along the pit-holed track through, surprise surprise, humongous puddles without breaking the cars, and having to jump out every few minutes to open and shut gates. Anyway we got there parked the cars and scouted for a place to pitch up. You know there should be a law that you can only run a camp-site if there is at least some places that are flat. Because seriously we had to just choose between sloped and more sloped. We had three tents between us (actually we had more but we only used three.) One of the guys had a one man tent, which I have no idea how he fit in because he's over 6 foot. I think he had contact with both ends of the tent. Anyway the three other boys took a four man tent and my friend and I took a two man tent.

The boys for some reason decided to pitch up on a spot that had obviously previously been someone else's spot, and seeing as it had been raining and still would be raining I don't know why they would want to set up on a place already slick with mud. My friend and I, sensibly I think, chose a very grassy patch near by as did the guy in the one man tent.

Anyway we put everything up, it all went pretty well, so I wont bore you with the details, I'll just mention though how our two man tent had the funkiest poles ever; they were all pretty and sparkly and gold, blue and purple. So we unloaded our stuff and got our beds ready getting out stuff we needed and stole into the boys tent, it was bigger and you could actually sit up in it, actually you could even stand up in it in a fashion, just very stooped. But still, they had way more room with two porches, plus the food. Did you really think we would go into their tent for anything else? You dirty people.

So we did what we could while stuck in a tent with raining pouring down outside, yes by this time it had started again. We talked, and played cards and ate lunch and stole the boys sleeping bags and thermo-rests....what, it was cold.

That was pretty much all we did all day, going out when the sun briefly showed its face before being chased back in again by the rain. Around 5:30 - 6 the boys decided to start dinner. The boys were pretty much in charge of food as they are in the explorers and have been camping a lot. I've never tried to cook anything on a camping stove and it probably wasn't a good time to start. But perhaps to your surprise they made a very nice dinner of pasta with smoked salmon sauce, and lots of onion but it was very very nice. The guy in the one man tent didn't eat with us, he's an army kind of guy and had a load of ration pack things, which he decided now was a good time to use them. They looked pretty nasty, and as he pointed out, they are supposed to be for army use when in enemy territory and you don't want to be lugging much round and leaving traces of stuff so you just have condensed stuff, yet all the packages are shiny....is it just me or does that seem a little silly, I mean if they accidental litter something shiny it's going to be so more obvious to trackers.

And the contents looked foul, a sausage and mash one was bright bright orange, but he seemed to like it. We washed our dishes, scraping burnt bits off the bottom with difficulty and had some of my Nanaimo bars which were decidedly mushed after being in the car when they are supposed to be refrigerated but they are just sugar really so no one complained.

Well that night we went to the local pub, just to get somewhere warm a dry and have some proper drinks, actually I hadn't drank hardly anything that day so I had a splitting head ache and got a nice big glass of water and ice. We played cards which is what pubs are for really, the alcohol available is just a bonus to those who enjoy it. And there I discovered that one of the guys is absolutely hopeless at cards, he didn't even seem to know which suit was diamonds, spades, clubs and hearts though I am sure he wasn't so bad that he couldn't have figured the diamonds and hearts out. I had been wondering in previous games why he had been putting cards down then other ones later that would have won him the set. We were playing Gin Rummy by the way, and I will not bother to explain, if you want to know I'm sure there are a million and one places on the internet that tell you all about it. Also you are supposed to pick up a card first from one of the two piles and then throw one away but he kept doing it the other way round even though we told him not to, even explaining that you picked on up to see if you could use it to make a run or a set and throw it away if it was useless or throw another one away if it wasn't useless but he just did not seem to understand poor guy, I think some of the others got a little annoyed at him. I know I did once when he said he would skip the next game out so I dealt for 5 and when my friend came back from getting drinks he had stole her cards! I was like what! Why didn't you just tell me and I would have dealt more Grrrr.

Anyway by the time we left it was pretty dark, the Lake District is far from any major cities really and larger towns are blocked by one if not more ranges of mountains so we had to stumble along in the dark with a couple of feeble torches. Now I don't know if it was because of having so little to drink that day, tiredness of just something about the light but I got really dizzy at one point and started leaning towards one of lights and I just couldn't stay upright, even worse I was walking right next to a puddle, lucky I managed to right myself but I clung onto one of the others all the way back.

Getting to bed was pretty easy, no real mishaps except when I was trying to find my torch so I wouldn't have to lean over my friend in the middle of the night for hers if I needed it. I turned out both my bags and couldn't find it which really annoyed me, but I found it the next day when we were packing up, in my walking shoes.

Oh and just so you know, I've never been proper camping before, this trip wasn't really proper camping either, I mean we were in a camp-site with toilets and showers but before I'd only gone with a friend and her family who took it all, air beds, pillows, TV, the works. So I had no proper camping stuff, the roll mats to keep the cold out from the ground or a proper sleeping bag, all of ours are old, frayed and falling apart, so when I woke up in the middle of the night to find my sleeping bag twisted round I was pretty could because where the zip was let all the cold in.

Still I am glad I slept as well as I did with my headache, I decided not to chance it going away and took two paramol tablets before settling down. It rained on and off through the night like it had during the day but it didn't really bother me except to wonder about the fate of my bags sitting in the floor less porch area on plastic bags.

We woke late, who was I to get up for the rain? With a fairly warm bed if albeit hard and deny my body the sleep it wanted, plus it would mean I'd have to wait longer for breakfast, or at least feel like it. As it was I could have well forgone that meal.

I'd slept partially clothed that night, one because I'd left my pyjama top at home and two, for extra warmth, just in case so I decided there wasn't much point putting fresh clothes on just to get muddy again so I could get out of bed and stay in clothes that were already warm, that's always a bonus in camping.

By the time we got to the boys tent they had got breakfast started, actually they had started it the night before, something about leaving the oats to soak all night in milk or what ever. Us two girls refused to eat it raw so I guess the result was sort of our fault. They started cooking it on the stove and by the time I had entered the tent properly, you know after scrambling in trying not to slip on the mud then sitting down and wrestling my shoes off it was smelling rather, wrong. The smell was distinctly wood smoke kind of ash smell, I was certainly not looking forward to eating it and was hoping it tasted better than it smelt. Boy was I wrong, by the time I dished everyone's out, I don't know how I ended up with the task, it was starting to get cold. The two cooks were making a big show of saying how delicious it was and another was saying that after a while you got used to the taste. I couldn't confirm that because I didn't eat that much, I blamed the fact that my bowl was biggest so I had inadvertently put more in my own so I couldn't finish it, it was quite rightly the worst think I have ever tasted, even things that aren't meant to be eaten taste better than that! We stuck all the bowls out side and zipped up the tent to keep the smell out and talked about crap again.

We had originally planned to go walking but its never nice setting out for a long walk in the rain, so we said if it was still raining at 10, or was it 11, that we wouldn't go, it did stop before that time but started again but I think it had stopped at the allotted time. First things first, we packed, it took a little while as we got in each others way chucking things around and trying to roll up sleeping bags but we were all ready and it started tipping it down again so we sat inside to wait if off, and in my boredom I got the camera out and took some pictures. Camera's and the insides of tents do not match, while inside the tent the pictures I took looked yellowy gold but now they look red, I might put them up. Because I was taking the picture and laying awkwardly around our stuff and my friend, lets just say I look decidedly odd, or at least that's my excuse, I'll have to get my friends permission first before I put them up.

By the time we decided it had stopped raining enough to venture out the boys had seemed to disappear but apparently they had gone to dispose of the left over breakfast, which I had conveniently forgot about. Next stuff was dumped in cars and tents were taken down trying to spread the mud as little as possible, it seems so long ago that I started writing this I can't remember what I've said and what I haven't. But the boys four man tent at least was pretty dirty as one of the boys had not realised that the tent flap dropped downwards onto the floor and if you let it do it outside the tent onto the muddy floor and then stand on it, it gets very very dirty! Seriously you would think they didn't realise they had feet on the ends of their legs, I also saw him knock off a pan which was perched on top of a gas stove then in going to pick the pan up knocked over the whole stove! It's no wonder half the male population can't seem to dance, they are the most un-co-ordinated creatures ever! They are menace to the house, I read a newspaper article about dogs and how much damage they cost in the house, Chihuahuas topped the list I believe, but I bet if you stuck men in there why they would wipe the floor!

But that's getting away from the story, for some reason it was decided we would walk all the way to the farm house to collect our quiet deposit and then walk all the way back to the cars just to drive them back to the farm house on the way out. Something about getting more bags to put muddy things in before they went in the car but...

To be honest for most of this trip I didn't really know what people were planning to do, heck I didn't even know where we were going till the actual day, I think we left the site planning to do a walk and we turned into a car park but the guys in the other car stopped rolled down their windows and said they thought it was raining a bit much for a walk. It was raining quite hard so I'll give them that but I'd been wanting to try my brand new very own walking socks, they were purple! But it's going to have to wait till another time. Instead we went to this...place, mall thing. It had random shops in one was full of walking stuff, and oh my gosh they had the most wonderful wellies ever, they were red with black paw prints on them, I so wanted them but they were like £40. There was also a food shop which we all went and looked at the alcohol, blegh. There was one of those body shops that smelled pretty nice, a paper factory shop, a chocolate shop (I would have stayed there much longer if I could have) and half a dozen other random shops. And a room all about the lake district, titled Ice, Celts, Normans and Romans....I didn't understand why they had a list of different people and then just Ice, were they a group of people too, that I've never heard of? Apparently it did just mean ice as in solidified water, but yeah there was a show kind of thing talking about the history of the lakes that we watched, it had a large 3D map which it projected onto, it was kind of interesting but the map was fairly cool.

Yeah, after that we went home, after lunch of course but that's the end of my camping trip....I'm not sure how many people will have actually read this far, probably got bored a long way back but yeah....anyway....