Remember last time we went camping? With the terrifying park ranger and the iron gate removing us from society and the rattlesnakes?
This weekend was not like that.
So here’s what I’m going to recommend to you: Know someone who owns a permanent campground, and who will invite you along to partake in it. Because my friend Alisa’s family has a spot in Mendocino County that they keep set up all summer long, complete with decks, a full kitchen (complete with granite countertops, a 3-burner stove, and a stainless steel sink), a bar, a table to fit twelve with a gazebo and cozy chairs, and a 1970s trailer with seriously amazing wallpaper. I’m also going to recommend that, once you’ve secured your invite, to make sure that you travel with a pack of friends who don’t bring things like children along with them (so there is silence), and do bring things like salmon fillets along with them (because in the absence of these children you can make those salmon fillets after night falls, and there’s no one spread-eagled on the floor wailing that they NEED A SNACK).
We listened to audiobooks and drank rose while floating on a pontoon boat. We wake surfed, and Erin fell (oh my god, so much). We knitted, and read horribly gossipy magazines, and sat on the dock at sunset with our feet in the water, and had no idea whatsoever what was going on in the outside world because there was no service – and not like “no service” where you can do the personal hotspot thing and get a little service….like actually no service at all. (We should probably have been clued into this fact when we stopped at the last store that had wifi and discovered that the proprietor did not have a shirt, but did have a single earring featuring a rattlesnake tail from a rattlesnake that I am 100% certain he killed himself.)
We took golf carts on joyrides down to the bathrooms and screamed while we removed hornets from our tent and had raging pillow fights that ended up with nudity (but not the sexy kind; the “I’m PUTTING MY BUTT ON YOUR BED” kind, and trust me, if you’d been there you would have thought it was funny too.)
We ate breakfast burritos that we made from scratch because seriously, what the hell else did we have to do?
You should go on a girls’ weekend sometime, permanent campground or no. And you shouldn’t feel guilty about it, because every once in awhile it’s pretty cool to have the opportunity to be your ridiculous, screaming self, and to get to eat the whole damn s’more without sharing.
Below are a lot of pictures of the weekend I just spent in the deep, deep woods with Alisa and Erin and her mom and her extremely, extremely cool friends. Let’s kick it off with a ferociously attractive shot of me realizing that I’ll have no service for the next two days and trying to use the (completely dead, spider-coated) pay phone in a nearby town to let Kendrick know that.
Cute. Let’s move on.
