Motorcycle Camping

It is really Peter Egan's fault that we got it in our heads to try motorcycle camping. If he hadn't been such a good storyteller and if we hadn't read his book called Leanings, then we probably wouldn't have found ourselves soaking wet and trying to put up a newly purchased 3-man tent in the pouring rain. Peter made it all sound so romantic and minimalistic and somehow that appealed to our middle-aged senses. Maybe somehow the idea of packing up what little bit of camping equipment we could haul in and on our V-Star dredged up some long forgotten youthful dream, but whatever it was, we hit the trail last week looking for adventure. Funny, it didn't look like rain when we left our house, but barely 30 minutes from home on our 60 minute spur-of-the-moment trip, we started getting wet. We could have turned around and called it quits, but neither one of us wanted to give up that easily. What was a little rain! So we forged ahead. At first, our jeans were only wet from the knees down, but by the time we made it to the gate of the campground and we pulled up to the ranger's ticket window the rain had pretty much soaked us. There were plenty of camping sites to pick from we were told. But the cheap ones in the Primitive section were a muddy mess the ranger said. The Park had just hauled in red clay for the road the day before and campers had been fleeing the Primitive area because of the rain and the conditions of the road. So, did we turn around and go home? No, we paid the bigger bucks, $18, for one of the developed sites with electricity/water/ & sewer hook-up (a little bit of over kill since all we had on us was a tent, a couple of blow up sleeping mats, one sleeping bag, and a flashlight). The rain stayed with us for the rest of the night until about 3 am. At that point we emerged from the tent and made our way to the closest bathhouse only to discover on the way back from there that our one flashlight had very poor batteries. I did happen to have a tiny booklight in my pocket so once in a while we used it to find our way. We broke camp about 6am in order to make it back for church, because Gregg had a prior committment. It was only after he had packed up the tent that I remembered to get the camera out so all that was left to take a picture of was our wet helmets that you see posted here.