This is a tale of adventure, or more accurately misadventure. This was the first, and so far last, time Kaje and I went camping. Mostly because neither of us bothered to ask the other just what exactly they loved about camping, we just agreed that we both had a special place in our respective heart for it, so we decided to go. So I loaded up my week pack with a lightweight tent, two mummy backs, 4 bottles of water, granola, and a footprint pad to prevent tent tearing. She grabbed a book bag filled with marshmallows, chocolate, graham crackers, hot dogs, and fruit roll ups. Though I would find this out later. We set out to the local hiking trails. For the first part of the day we hiked a few miles sans the packs just to get a look at the trails. Upon our return we found out that we needed to register to use the camp sites on the trails and the one we wanted was around a 10 mile hike, but was taken that night, so we had to use the one that was just a mile out instead. It was at this point I learned about the contents of Kaje's pack. It turns out that Kaje did what I would call Vacation Camping. The Kind that involved a camper, electricity, and toilets. When I think camping I think hiking 10-15 miles with a camel pack, water filter and not a whole lot more. Given the fact that we only had to go a mile I thought "what the heck" we'll mix the two worlds together and go to the Walmart we passed on the way in, pick up a soft cooler, ice, some soda, and some more snack... This was a very poor decision. We got directions from the officer who reserved the camp site for us. So bad in fact that he pointed West, the site was not West. None the less we set out that direction with our packs, and a cooler fully loaded with a 10lbs back of ice, soda, and hotdogs. After about 3 miles and noticing that the afternoon was well into evening Kaje thought maybe we went the wrong way. The cooler strap had made quite a furrow in my shoulder at this point, but we turned back to retrace our 3 mile trip to the parking lot. We made it out with about an hour of sun and decided to risk the mile trek, cooler and all, to the camp site. Apparently we we're starting to wear thin because it took almost the entire hour to get there, it also may have had something to do with the fact that is was almost 2 miles out. It was completely dark when we got there. Kaje impressed me with her ability to put up a tent she had never touched before quickly and in the dark. I managed to get a fire started by burning almost all of a notebook she had, and we had dogs, fruit rollups, soda, and smores. We played a little MASH in the tent on the scraps of notebook left, and Yahtzee got packed into the book bag of hers too. All in all we had a blast, I had some nasty blister from the cooler, but we made sure to eat everything we brought, so the 2 mile hump to the car in the morning wasn't so bad.

I know this is a bit different than the normal posts, but I love this story and sharing some of our ridiculousness on the two year anniversary of the day I tricked her into agreeing to marry me seemed ok.