Camping A Go-Go

It's safe to say that Oregon has an over abundance of natural beauty that has a way of beckoning one to the outdoors, eventually. We've always been the type of people to prefer a hotel over spending the night in the wild, but a recent class at our local REI store got us motivated to give camping a whirl. After a trip to the aforementioned REI store as well as Fred Meyer we had all the supplies we needed for our first camping adventure. We will eventually post of a list of camping essentials for your reference, but we feel we should get a little more camping experience under our belts before we start doling out the advice. Until then you can go here for some helpful advice.

For our first time out we decided to not stray to far from home, so we choose a nearby state park. L.L. Stub Stewart State Park was just a scenic 30 minute drive from home base, and once there we could hardly believe we were so close to home. Stub Stewart is a really nice, newer state park with several tent and rv campsites and lots of trails for hiking. We arrived on a Saturday afternoon, set up our camp, and hit the trails for a pre-dinner hike. When we returned to camp we started building our fire, and after a few attempts we got a fire going. We roasted hot dogs and marshmallows for s'mores - real gourmet camp food. Once the sun went down, we were treated to an amazing starry sky complete with shooting stars (or meteors). The one downside to our camping trip was the sleeping on the ground thing. The camp sites at this park are packed gravel and it's just as fluffy as it sounds. Also, a guy at the adjacent camp site sawed logs (as in snored) all night long. We theorized that his long suffering wife banishes him to the wilderness on the weekends so she can catch some zzzs and he can make some other poor saps suffer. Well, without much rest we were pretty much ready to get out of there come morning light and that's exactly what we did.

All in all we did enjoy our night of camping, and with a few minor adjustments we could really get into to this whole being outdoors thing. Next time we plan to have better padding to sleep on and maybe pack some earplugs, you know just in case. Speaking of next time we just made arrangements for a camping trip to Crater Lake, and you better believe we will be blogging about that complete with lots of pictures. So if anyone is still reading this blog and has any tips for camping or specifically camping at Crater Lake, let us know.