8.17 - Camping

Early in the morning I spent time lounging around. I was sore from climbing Mount Elbert.  I had quite a few marks from all my mosquito bites.  

Note the chair in front of the window. That's the peeping chair and peeping window. The chair has gotten ruined from the dogs using it that it isn't really meant to have a human sit on it. 

Once we figured we were going to go to the bog and them camping, it was time to use the internet to find the bog. Well what do you know the internet was no help. We called the park service and got our call forwarded to someone and we had to leave a message.  Then we tried to water people and got our call forwarded to someone and ended up learning where it was.

It was a secret. It was also hard to get to.  There were things like you drive on this road until you have about a half mile of pine trees on each side, then you go a little further and there is a spot for 2 cars to park on the side. You walk up there and find a stream. Then you walk 15 minutes along it until you find the bog.  Now to me that made me think we wouldn't know how we were in the wrong spot for over 15 minutes.   But we found it. Our trip started off successfully.  While we were on our way up, the forest service guy (I think that's who he was) called us back.  He didn't want to disclose the location but lucky for us we were already headed up. We told him that. He was shocked.  He was from Greensburg. What a small world. He said yinz there at the end.

I've never seen Callie so interested in taking pictures of anything.  I even gave her my little camera so she could take more pictures after she filled up her memory card.

The day seemed so successful. We got so many great pictures. It may seem like I put a lot on here but that's just a small fraction of the ones we took.

The only bad part about our little adventure was that my shoes got soaked. I didn't have spare shoes with me. I knew I should have packed them. Well I knew I was not packing stuff that I should have.  I was never camping before but I didn't want to pack a million things I didn't need.

I think the reflection pictures are more impressive to me than the plant ones.

I probably took more pictures of Callie and Timmy taking pictures than I did of the pretty things. But I figured they were getting pictures of the nice streams so why should we have a million copies of the same thing.

The bottom left picture was the view coming down from the bog.

Then it was off to camping.  The first spot that Callie wanted to go to was taken, so we had to find a new spot. The car didn't make it over the hill at our new spot but it was fine parking right behind it.  We camped near Irwin Lake but not sure if where we camped has a name. It probably does but I just don't know it. 

We hung out by the camp fire. We made some bratwurst. We talked. We talked about how awful high school was. Then we just decided to do some pushups. We observed so many stars. It was amazing.
We finally went to sleep early for once. In the tent Timmy slept in the middle and 2 dogs slept between me and him. Callie didn't get to sleep with an extra blanket under her sleeping bag because the dogs hogged all the room.  Timmy opened his sleeping bag to cuddle better with the cold dogs. I think it dropped to about 35 degrees that night but we were all warm in the sleeping bag and tents.  Well we were kind of all warm. I woke up cold. I got an extra shirt and covered my ear and neck with it. Then it was all good.

PS The shirt I'm wearing is what I refer to as my fraud shirt. It is a fraud because it says Pittsburgh Marathon but I never ran it.  The Dick's Sporting Goods Marathon bag is also my fraud bag. I took that on this trip too.  I was full of fraud. I had one other long sleeve fraud shirt and I also wore that in Colorado but not while camping.