Every time Carole and I walked through Costco we always seemed to pause at the tents and sleeping bags. I hadn't camped since I was in Boy Scouts when I was 14, and Carole hadn't been camping in close to 30 years unless you want to count a trip she took with a friend on the east coast. But the beach camping she did with her friend was Martha Stewart style, with center pieces and a layout that caterers would be proud of. (Who ever heard of a split level tent with a library and maid quarters???)
So we decided to give motorcycle camping a shot. For my birthday a couple of years ago Carole bought me a tent that I had been admiring for some time. A short while later we bought a Coleman air mattress and it took its place by the tent in the garage. Every morning as I mounted my bike in the garage I would look at the camping equipment and think of ways to get started. As we started planning our Summer 2006 riding vacation I realized that camping for a night could be a whole bunch less expensive than staying at a hotel. As I made reservations for all of our stops on our planned vacation trip I took a gamble by making reservations for camping in Nebraska, Colorado and Utah. Now we were committed.
I did some research on sleeping bags and ordered a couple of $130.00 down filled bags from
Campmor (man, had the technology and pricing changed since my Boy Scout days!). The main decision factor on the sleeping bags was that they were rated for temps down to 20 degrees and they were extremely light and compressible. I then ordered a backpack with 7,000 cubic inches capacity. I figured that the tent, air mattress, and sleeping bags needed to go into a pack so that we could hike reasonable distances to camping spots while carrying everything in one trip from the bikes. A fellow rider had heard about my interest in camping so one day when he dropped by to borrow a tool he gifted us with a single burner Coleman stove (thanks a million times over, Snowman!). We added a Java Press camping coffee pot and a battery operated lantern to our cache of camping equipment and felt ready to go.
It dawned on me that we might want to test all our gear out before going on our long summer ride, just to see what we had missed and might need to re-think. So Carole and I decided that a short local overnight camping excursion was in order. We decided on Saturday, June 10 as our initial foray into "roughing it," and immediately began to seek out a campground that would suit our needs. It needed to be close, within 200 miles of home. I wanted it to be relatively close to civilization in case we found that we forgot something important, but I wanted it to be remote enough to truly give a camping experience.
Initially we decided we would head up to the North Bay and camp at
Harbin Hot Springs , a New Age sort of retreat that offered camp sites. We were all set to go when Carole called ahead just to see if they thought they would be extremely busy that weekend (they don't take reservations for camping). We were shocked at the price, but really shouldn't have been when you consider what the amenities are they offer. So we decided we better look for another place since this was going to be about camping and not about finding our inner peace or opening our chakras.
We quickly found out that camping in California is a heck of a lot more popular than either of us had imagined! We searched for hours for a campground where we could reserve a site but almost all of the campgrounds in California that took reservations were booked. Luckily I stumbled across
Calaveras Big Trees State Park and found that they had one camp site still available for reservation. I quickly clicked a link and made our reservation. It turned out to be a nice find.
The weekend finally arrived and I headed home from work on Friday night filled with an excitement and sense of new adventure that I hadn't felt in some time. A quick call to Carole revealed that she was just as excited. I told her I was going to head to a store on the way home and pick up some Coleman Liquid Fuel and some D-cell batteries for our mattress pump and electric lantern. I checked several places and it seemed like there had been a run on Coleman Liquid Fuel, everyone was sold out. My final stop was at Walmart where I also found they were sold out of the fuel. So I made a quick decision and picked up a single burner propane/butane burner. It was incredibly small, tiny enough that I could put it in my bike's glove box if I wanted to (no exaggeration there). It used a mini canister of 70/30 compressed gas that was also extremely small. I also picked up some wet-wipes and camping toilet paper (I should not have been walking through a camping section of a store the day before an inaugural camping trip) and found our D-cell batteries.
I rushed home, packed the tent, air mattress, sleeping bags and camping supplies into our back pack while Carole packed our clothes and miscellaneous sundries into our Pakit Rak. Then we both headed to the grocery store to grab our camping dinner. Focacia bread, a couple of peaches, a couple of apples, seedless grapes, gouda cheese, and a couple of bottles of wine (we couldn't decide on red or white so we grabbed both) seemed like the perfect evening meal for us. We rushed back home and packed a picnic backpack my mother had bought us for Christmas with our groceries. I then mounted everything to the bikes, backpack on the GL backseat and the picnic pack on the back seat of the ST, and we were ready to go.
I usually have a real tough time sleeping the night before a ride due to the excitement. I was surprised to see that Carole had an even tougher time sleeping due to her excitement. This was going to be a blast! It combined everything we both loved: motorcycle riding, outdoor adventure and physical exercise. We were ready to get started!