atoms into suns

On long holiday weekends we generally hang out at home, knowing that anywhere we decide to go will be packed with people. This Labor Day weekend, however, restlessness apparently got the best of us, because we packed up the car and headed off to... one of the busiest national parks in the US.

Strangely, we'd been assured on the phone that there were camping spots available, but when we got to the visitors' center we found a half-mile line to get in the main gate and only halting assurances that there might be a spot or two left when we finally got there.

So... we bailed. We took the ranger's "last-resort" suggestion and headed south and east, away from the park and onto National Forest land, where we could camp anywhere we wanted.

And a good time was had by all.

We even got to have a campfire (hooray for rain!), which allowed us to eat our traditional weekend-camping meal, plus smores. The fire is also where this trip's camp gremlin showed up. I had carved one, but then this one decided to make its appearance in a piece of burning wood. (Gremlins are hard to catch on film, so if you don't see it, don't worry about it.) It seems to have had a secondary gremlin, though, since this one showed up when I took a picture.

The only hitches were: the Jeep that came tearing up the road, then back down, sometime around midnight, the dirt bikes that tore up and down the road starting at about 8am, and the fact that it is a Law of the Universe that I must have a cold every time we go camping. Even these things didn't cause any real problems, though. (Well, the cold made me not want to get anything done last week...)

Oh, and I got to play with our new digital camera.