Blog: I’m Back!

None of you would’ve guessed this, but I’ve been gone camping for past week. Thanks to WordPress’s schedule option, I was able to write my posts for last week a week in advance and let the computer do the rest of the work so none of you guys lost out on any blog posts. But enough about WordPress. Let’s talk about some of the highlights of the trip.

The first highlight were the critters. Wildlife is always fun to see on camping and hiking trips, but in this case, the wildlife was incredibly friendly…a little too friendly. The first time we really noticed this was the second morning there when two deer walked into our campsite while I was eating breakfast. They stood in the trees around the site initially and started moving closer until they were maybe 3-5 feet away from me and my brother. My mom started trying to shoo them, but they just wanted to stick around. They did not care that us humans were trying to get them to leave. Finally, the one closest to us began to lick the tin-foil-covered tongs that we had left out on the cooking grate, my mom started moving quickly towards them and they left. They made a few more appearances like that and at one point I got maybe a foot away from one of them trying to get it to leave.

I’m Snow White, guys. The not insufferable version.

Two other friendly critters were Chips and Master Squeaks-A-Lot. Chips was – as you might’ve guessed – a chipmunk that kept running around the campsite at Mach 10, looking for food. While the little dude was somewhat more skittish than the deer, he would sometimes come up close enough where we could’ve pet him if we wanted to. At one point, he got so close to my mom’s shoe that we thought he was going to jump up on her.

As for Master Squeaks-A-Lot, he was a gray squirrel and, while very cute, especially while eating seeds and pinecones, was super loud. Every morning, we would wake up to the sound of birds chirping and the peace would be broken by Master Squeaks-A-Lot screaming at some other gray squirrel while it screamed right back. The dude had no chill.

The second highlight of the trip was the area we were in. It was right next to a big river (I’m not going to name it since I don’t want to give away my location and there are too many tourists there) in a massive valley. That meant that the view of the valley walls and steep cliffs was gorgeous and when it was too hot, you could easily walk to the river and wade around in it. However, it also meant there were lots of bugs and when the storms would roll in, they were usually soakers.

The third highlight came on the drive home. We had decided to take the scenic route home to avoid 4th of July traffic and as we rolled into the largest city on our trip, we noticed some massive storm clouds building above the mountains. We didn’t think too much of it, stopped at a Safeway to get some drinks and snacks, and continued driving home. My brother started checking the radar and sure enough, a large storm with rotation and hail was coming our way. That wasn’t wonderful, but it seemed to be shifting away, so we got onto the highway and continued driving. Then the storm redirected and was coming at us again, trapping us on the highway with ping-pong ball size hail smacking into our car. Eventually, we found the exit and parking under an awning to avoid getting any hail damage and the storm blew over after about 45 minutes. When we got back and unpacked the car, we only found one hail dent on the roof, thankfully.

Now with the highlights of the trip out of the way, it’s time to show you the trip. While on the way to camp and adventuring around the area, I was filming short snippets and putting them into short format on my YouTube channel. Enjoy the videos (like and subscribe)!