Camping Trip

We met Megan, Wes, and Wyatt at Ray Roberts state park. We camped, fished, biked, and cooked. (Video and story continued below)

We had never been to Ray Roberts before. It is very nice park; the campsites have water, electricity, gravel tent areas, and aluminum picnic tables. As soon as we got there, I started prepping for dinner, a pot roast that was going to cook all day long. I breaded it and browned it in a big dutch oven, then buried it with burning charcoals and covered it all with dirt.

We sat around and visited for a while then went to the kids fishing pond. This was Bryson’s first time at fishing and he seemed to like it pretty well. He mostly just wanted to reel in the line. The weather was beautiful; we watched the sunset across the lake.

Back at camp, I carefully dug out the dutch oven with our roast in it. I was pretty saddened to see my coals had burned out, and everything was cold. My thought is that this method needs lots of hot coals, and charcoal is not a substitute. I rebounded OK, getting everything hot again, adding onions and carrots to the inside. While that was finishing up, I filled another dutch oven with peanut oil and started frying potato slices. When that was almost done, I started the peach cobbler in a third dutch oven. Everything turned out pretty good. The massive amounts of fat, meat, and sugar has been a shock to my system though.

Megan brought her spoiled inside-only dog, Bentley. We tied him up in different places, finally deciding that it worked best when he was confined to the outside edge of the campground. After Wes turned in (it was 2 hours past his 7pm bedtime), Megan left to go to the bathroom. Amber and I heard what we thought was another dog approaching. Bentley started growling and ran toward it. A spraying noise was next. An instant after that, Bentley was running back toward us and then the smell hit us. It was a skunk! Now our campground smelled entirely different, and not too good. Bentley was snorting, foaming at the mouth, doing flip-flops and somersaults in the weeds. We knew Megan would not be happy when she got back, because this dog has never even slept outside!

The three of us crammed into my four-man tent that is really a two-man tent. I talked Amber out of bringing our big air mattress, so we slept on 1/4″ foam pads. This was the worst thing about the weekend. I don’t think I did much sleeping between bryson rolling over (usually slapping me in the face in the process) and positioning myself between rocks all night.

Sunday morning Megan made omelets and pancakes. We eventually went for a short bike ride around the area, then packed everything back up and came home.

Bryson had a great time. He and Wyatt spent the weekend hitting things with sticks, hauling loads of dirt and gravel, filling all the latches on our coolers with dirt and gravel, and generally being “helpful”. Bentley slept in Wes’s pickup, much to his delight the next morning. I let Bryson drive to the bathroom. (video below) He places lots of emphasis on sounds and steering input, but doesn’t pay attention to what he is aiming at yet.