Camping
2003-07-28, 12:56 p.m.

Back from my weekend of camping. Lest you think I'm the outdoorsy sort, let me clear things up: I am not. At least not historically so. Yet, I had a great time. We went with a group from church. Unity isn't your normal, every day, garden variety Christian group. Thank God. We didn't spend all our time praying or singing churchy songs. In fact, at the obligatory campout singalong, we only sang a church song or two, along with the Beatles, John Lennon, Aretha Franklin, and myriad others. It was reasonably entertaining. PJH thought it was great fun though since she loves to sing and others who were with us could sing so she had singing buddies. I can't carry a tune if you pop it in a sack and clearly label it. I'll start out with A and wind up somewhere between C and G. Is there a G key?

We switched our campsite once we got there. We had been, for some reason, banished to RV land. Since we did not have an RV, we asked friends if we could crash their site and they graciously agreed. There was us, of course, another lesbian couple (Mickey and Amber) along with their daughter and a straight woman, Judy. Judy is far more hilarious than her teacher persona might lead one to believe. She looks so ... staid. But she's actually fun and I'm glad she was with us.

One of our friends, Barbara, brought a friend of hers along who happens to work at the agency where I'm on the board. She seems so calm and collected at work, which she is, but she is also really fun. She kept me laughing all weekend.

Our first night was less than successful. I was sent away from The Campsite during The Putting Up of the Tent. I suppose it's because I seem to lose all my brain power when tents are involved. I can take one down and pack it up really well but can't manage to act like I've a brain cell left when it comes to putting it up. I'll tell you, though, that acting girly and smiling nicely and flirting outrageously will get the butcher among us to rush to fill in and help PJH put it up. :) In any case, we got the tent up and went on about our business. Two campsites down were a bunch of young people. Teenagers. Where their father was during all this I don't know. Anyway, we went to bed at 12:30. They, however, felt a need to be up and making noise quite late. For some reason, my Inner Curmudgeon did not rouse and go tell them to shut the fuck up, I just tossed and turned. I finally fell asleep only to be woken by an odd noise outside our tent and our dog, Tasha, huffing and standing up looking at the door to the tent ferociously. Then, I heard the pat of small feet running past my head and then crunching. Crap. I left the dog food out and the raccoons were having a midnight snack. I woke PJH up to go shoo them away. Since these raccoons were quite used to humans and not at all frightened by PJH, the only thing she could do was let the dog tree them. You know, our dog had better manners than those teenagers since she didn't bark once or make any noise to wake anyone else.

PJH came back in to our tent trying not to laugh out loud. Turns out, she saw our minister's husband outside in his boxer shorts trying to rescue all their food from the raccoons. That's really not a sight one needs to see at 4:30 am when to laugh would be even ruder than it would be mid-day.

At one point, I went to the campsite's general store to buy more ice. We'd driven PJH's Baja which is yellow and attracts quite a bit of attention because is C-O-O-L. Or so I'm told. There was another, completely unrelated to us, group of young-ish dyke-y looking women walking up the road that I drove by and they were quite interested in the car. Turns out they were going to the store as well. By te time they arrived, I had already gone in and bought my ice and was back to the car trying to unsnap the back cover to put it inside. One of them came up to me and says. "Do you need some help with that?" I smiled nicely and thanked her while she opened the cover. She and her friends were oohing and ahhing over the car. I, apparently, looked the part of your basic straight girl that day. Could it have been the capri pants, the tank top, the slides or the pink hair dealie keeping my hair out of my face? In any case, when in response to their admiration of the car, I said, "My partner sure digs it. I'll tell her you liked it." You could have heard a pin drop. The gasp of shock irritated me really. To their credit, they recovered quickly and were nice and polite as I said my goodbyes and got back in the car to return to my campsite.

You know, there was once a time when it would have been *me* causing a ruckus among the local lesbians. Sigh. Cool cars are highly overrated.