Nature's finest

 Captain Sam driving the boat

 The bathrooms...no water and lots of bugs! 

 Home sweet tent!

My first camping experience and it was 95 degrees outside at a park without running water in the bathrooms....I was not impressed to say the least. However, I like to say I give everything a fair shot once before deciding if I will try it again, and camping in the heat is not a fair shot. So, I will give it another go when temperatures drop below 65 degrees in the Fall :)

We received many camping items for wedding gifts and decided to spend Memorial Day weekend on the Ohio River at Forked Run Metro Park with Sam's dad, grandma, brother, and brother's girlfriend. Sam and I had spent the previous week scouring the Forked Run website for the perfect campsite to reserve for 3 tents and we found it! However, our first indication of how the weekend was going to unfold came when we arrived at the park to find someone else had stolen our site! Yes, they STOLE our campsite. When we checked in upon arriving, the park ranger said they put our little reserved tag on the post of campsite 118 for us, so we drove on into the park and found our site. But, already set up were several tents, clothes lines, camping chairs, and other camping equipment. The people stole our reserved tag off the post and pretended they had reserved it. We told the park ranger and she said they would make the people move, but we didn't want to anger them and have them come back for revenge on us during the night....did I mention the campers had a black skull and crossbones flag on their tent that said "Death Camp. Take No Prisoners"and they wore black leather with chains?? Yea....we decided the leave them alone. So, we found another site and it was fine, but the whole experience put a slight crimp in my impression of camping.

After setting up our tents, we all went to the river and spent a great afternoon on Sam's dad's large boat. It was great for relaxing and cruising along the river. We jumped off the front and swam to cool off. I never thought I would actually swim in the Ohio River (it's not exactly known for it's cleanliness and the fact that catfish the size of cars live on the bottom doesn't make it that enticing either) but with no shade or air conditioning in 95 degree heat, swimming was the only thing that kept me cool.

We boated all afternoon and into the evening, so it was dark when we got back to the campsite. Poor planning on our part because we had to finish setting up tents in the dark and attempt to fix hotdogs on our camping grill with only flashlights. Unfortunately, it was too hot to sit around the campfire and enjoy the best part of camping, so everyone pretty much turned in for the night. Sleeping in a tent outside is...different. Every shadow on the tent creeped me out and with the heat it was impossible to get comfortable. Around 5am it cooled off enough to sleep but then the sun came up and night was over! So, not much sleeping. We fixed pancakes on the grill and left for home around 9am.