June 18, 2008

So believe it or not, I've never been camping. Not real camping. I've been in those trailer things, but those don't really count apparently especially at an RV park. The family tried to tent once, at an RV park... but there were tornado warnings apparently, so we just went in the camper with our friends that brought a camper.
So anyway, after talking with this girl on the internet for a few weeks, Alayne, we decided that we should meet up and go camping for a few days.
So I took a few days off of work and drove up to Two Harbors, a little north of Duluth, where she lives and we went and hung out at Lake Superior for most of the day, chatting it up and doing things a normal couple would do. Lake Superior is freaking cold. After being up there for awhile I decided that Duluth would be a place I'd be interested in living too, if the Twin Cities didn't pan out.
But anyway, a few hours of that (Superior is gorgeous by the way, I went from the Gulf of Mexico for Spring Break to the Pacific Ocean for Costa Rica Spanish times to Lake Superior all in a few months... nice) we went to the campsite (Gooseberry Falls National Park), which turned out to be really confusing. The place where you have to pay for the campsite and parking permits was closed though it was supposed to be open until 8 pm, so we drove around confused until I asked someone at a campsite what we should do. They told us to go to the visitors center, where everything was pretty much sorted out from there. Then we went and finally found our campsite. The tent turned out be a major hassle, since it was missing a lot of pieces, so we drove back into town and she dropped me off at the beach while she went and talked to her mom and got a new tent (her mom would have killed her if she knew that she was going camping with a guy) and then we went and got food, lighter fluid, beers and all that jazz. So we went back to the campsite and tried to put the tent together again, which turned out to be a problem once again because there were more pieces missing from the tent, but she has that camping experience and put it together while I stood on the side without having a clue what to do, heh. Rookies, eh?
After the tent was finally up it was time to make a fire. Turns out she doesn't really have any experience in any of this either, at least without people helping her, so we had a lot of problems with keeping the fire going and she had to call her friend and I had to call my brother. Finally I accidentally knocked the wood over and broke the pyramid but the fire didn't stop after that. So we did the camping jazz and it was pretty cold so we just decided to go to sleep, but then the fire was so used to us trying to put it back on that it wouldn't go out. Finally it was out and we went in the tent, yada yada yada, and went to sleep.
When we woke up we put it all back together and packed and went to see the waterfalls where apparently she had a lot of field trips at when she was a kid. The falls were awesome and I decided that I needed to be touristy, take a ton of pics, and explore more than I was supposed to, pretty sure. After that there wasn't much to do anymore, so I left after we went to lunch. Sadly I was out of money so she had to pay for that. We split the camping jazz, but that and gas was about all I could afford. I finally got back into the Twin Cities around 4, but missed my exit so I had to drive through St. Paul, which I hadn't done before so god bless the GPS. And that was that. We had a lot of fun.