How It Started (Pt.1)

It all began in the weeks leading up to our 4 year anniversary and the conundrum of what we were going to do. Sometime during our planning my wife suggests we go camping and thinking it was a joke I just kinda laughed it off. Well a short time went by and the subject came up again and this time I had to ask, are you serious? You know we got married in the summer right? Yes she was serious and truthfully I loved the idea. I use to camp a great deal in my youth and loved the thought of being out in nature again but at the same time I am realistic. Neither of us are teenagers anymore and this is vacation, we want a certain level of comfort while we are out there.

So we started planning, listing out items and setting a budget that would not break us. I started visiting places like Academy and Wal-Mart during lunch to get a basic idea of what we would need (seeing as we had “0” camping gear this was almost everything.  Eventually and with the list made we headed and started purchasing supplies. Tent, camp stove, lights, canopy, chairs, utensils, and other odds and ends. In total we spent about $500.00 dollars on gear (I consider this an investment since 90% of it was reusable) and considered ourselves ready.

The night before we were to leave for the campground I carefully laid out all the items we would be taking in the garage and took and inventory and then piece by piece loaded them into the car (that had itself already been inspected and deemed ready for the trip). With the car loaded with everything except for what we needed in the morning we settled in for the evening then went to bed. In the morning we ran into no issues, the preparation we had taken before made the morning smooth and enjoyable. We cleaned up, jumped in the car, got some tacos and made the 2 hour drive to Inks Lake State Park in Burnett County, Texas.

When we arrived everything went pretty smooth, the tent was set-up, camp lay out was well organized, the only downside was that our campsite had ZERO shade, none, nada, zip… Oh I mentioned canopy earlier yah I meant a tarp and poles and they didn’t work so well. So it was hot, let me rephrase that, it was HOT as $%(*$#. We went for a swim to cool off and came back to eat lunch and it was just shy of miserable. We ate our sandwiches in what little shade the oven of a tent offered us then jumped in the car and headed to Marble Falls.

(to be continued)