How I Spent My Summer VacationMy boyfriend, Greg and I felt it would be a great opportunity to spend some quality time with our friends. We were going on a three day camping trip with long time friends, another couple, Chris and Heather.
Chris is the go-with-the-flow type of guy but only if Heather allows him to do so. Heather is a very kind person who looks out for others. She just crosses that line of being concerned to being motherlike. See we spend a lot of time with them, but it’s like other people’s children, you can go home and leave them, this time we couldn’t. You maybe asking yourself why would we decide to go camping with such people .
. . I just don’t know. This question would overwhelm Greg and me for the next two weeks while planning this getaway.
Greg looked more pessimistically at the trip then I did. I thought if you go looking for a bad time, the only outcome will be a bad time. Realizing that we could be each other’s only sanity from Heather’s overpowering behavior and Chris’s childlike mind, we made up little cues to give each other if we needed to getaway. We stocked up on interesting reading material to get lost in and relaxing alcoholic beverages to take off the edge. We packed up the trucks and we were off. Chris’s friend from work recommended the campsite so we decided to follow him since he had the directions.
We traveled up interstate 84 east bound over the Newburgh Beacon Bridge and made our way to the State Taconic Parkway. Now, this is where Greg and I looked at each other in agreement that the trip was going to go only down hill from there, the parkway that we had gotten ourselves onto by following Chris was for passenger cars only. We both had commercial trucks. About fifteen minutes on the highway we passed a State Trooper, thank God he didn’t budge from where he was sitting. Through that hour on the parkway we must have passed four Troopers, none of whom pulled us over. Finally, and I mean finally, we arrived two and a half hours later at our campsite.
All four of us got out of the trucks to observe where we were going to spend the next three days with each other, Greg and I actually found some humor with our surroundings. We were roughly twenty steps from the bathrooms and ten steps from our neighbors. We knew it couldn’t possibly get any worse until we heard the BANG of the bathroom door. I guess the camp people wanted to make sure the door would close properly to it’s full closer, a spring used to shut the volt door at a bank was used to shut this simple hollow wooden door.
With the startling noise of the door our neighbor let out several YEE-HAWS to his full capacity. With our minds made up that we were doomed, we applied our bug spray and set up camp. Chris was predetermined to create the largest campfire at the grounds. Greg said it is because he’s a pyro. So with the evening closing in, Chris sparks up a fire with a flare no less. Maybe he was just biding his time but I’ve gotten a larger fire on my grill at home.
Either way he was happy, Heather allowed him to play before he had to go to bed. Shortly after Chris got his pyro like tendencies out our neighbor decides to do the same. Tex, as we all agreed on calling him because of his big white cowboy hat, threw a fourteen-foot log and a couple bushes in a pile and to create his masterpiece. Watching him light it with gasoline Chris’s manlyhood was on the line, Tex’s fire was blazing. I’m sure you figured it right, Chris added more wood doing nothing but smothering it.
On that note we decided to head to our tents and go to sleep. Did I say sleep? We wanted to sleep but Tex seemed to have a snoring problem. Chris and Heather slept right through it, Greg and I on the other hand didn’t. We actually found it funny.
We couldn’t believe how Mrs. Tex slept with that but I guess she was used to it. We finally made it to sleep around three or so to be woken up by the crashing of the door and Yee-haws by our loud friend Tex. We got up and had our necessary dosage of coffee. It surprisingly was a relaxing day of no required energy. I found the greatest chuckle in Greg’s experience of taking a shower.
He told me in the most serious voice how he has never felt so violated. The showers were small, very dirty and overly populated. That second and last night I think is the most vivid to me of the entire time. Earlier a middle-aged woman, by herself, set up camp, well her chair at the site next to us behind Tex. We didn’t pay much attention to her all day. Night drew in and cris played with his fir, Greg sat back and laughed and Heather and I cleaned up from our chicken dinner.
From our lights at the campsite we could see the lonely lady sitting by herself in the dark. Chris, being told by Heather, went over to offer the woman a lantern and interrupted her. She was crying hysterically. Little did we know from that moment on she would not leave us alone until midmorning. We all found out a lot more about this stranger then I think we knew about each other.
Her name was Kim. She was crying because she just experienced a serious heartbreak after five years. We became very aware of her stalking potential by the way she explained how her heart got broken. A cup, which she brought to our site, was soon to be believed as full of alcohol. She was sloshed, repeating everything. I lost count of the times she told us of her breakup, her children, her job, her breakup and her job.
She also seemed to take to Greg very well, you could tell she liked him. I thought it was quite humorous since she could have been his mother. So since you have a basic understanding of what I did this summer I’ll close on this, gather more information on where you will be staying if you choose to go away with friends, find the humor in the people like Tex he could be better company then middle-aged drunken women named Kim.Engineering Reports
