Camping, cows, and a cold.

What is it about being outside for a full 48+ hours straight that seems to make you a little saner about life? At least it does for me. I just come back feeling so much more normal or something. Sigh, sometimes I don't know if I'm made for this 21st century lifestyle. Everything is so rushed and intentional all of the time, sometimes it seems there's no room left to squeeze in originality, spontaneity, or simply contentment. Ah, but I digress. This blog is about my camping trip this last weekend.

Mark and I had been planning our camping extravaganza (as we like to refer to it) for weeks. Longer than that, I guess, if you count all of the months we'd worked and finagled to get on the same schedule at the T-Mobile call center where we work so that we would actually have some time off together in which we could plan a camping extravaganza. So you can imagine how excited we were to finally get away.

Christie, a friend of mine at work told me about a place up past Cuba, NM, down Hwy 126 a ways where there was some beautiful Santa Fe National Forest where we could camp without paying the silly fees that those drive in camp grounds charge, and where we wouldn't be surrounded with other campers and their blaring radios playing Mexican Mariachi music. (Seriously, I can't get into it.) Christie, with whom I share the privilege of having Colorado being our home state, told me that this place always reminded her a lot of the camping in the Rocky Mountains. Eager to leave behind the desert and get some cool mountain air, we decided to check it out.

It really was everything that Christie said it was. And who would have thought it was so close to home? Only about 1 1/2 to 2 hours away. There were tall, beautiful pine trees, lush meadows of grass and wild flowers hidden in patches of the forest where the sun was able to leak through, and a sparkling blue lake only a 3/4 mile hike from where we set up our camp. Also, something that had failed to be mentioned, there were cows. Cows everywhere. Free ranging, mountain cows, apparently. Yeah... I was startled to say the least. They were just relaxing in the forest, or grazing on the edge of the highway. I'm not sure who they belong to...the state, maybe? All I can tell you is that there were cows, and whats more, where there are cows, my friend, there are cow patties. We had to leave the first spot that we had settled on because there were just too many of these patties to deal with. The next spot we found, however, was much more, um, sanitary.

We arrived in the afternoon on Friday and were able to stay until Sunday morning. The days were hot in the sunshine, but very cool in the shade. The nights were freezing. We had the pleasure of a full moon, and more than enough firewood to enjoy a fantastic, crackling fire whenever we wanted. We played Scrabble in the tent, played War with a deck of cards on the cooler in the shade, and hiked and played up to and around the San Gregorio Lake. We cooked some very impressive meals with the little charcoal bar-b-q we brought with us: Tilapia with brown sugar-baked beans and white macaroni shells and cheese; chicken fajitas with peppers and onions, cheese, sour cream, and cilantro. We brought some Mike's Hard Lemonade, but I believe I only drank half of one, and the other five are now sitting in my refrigerator, just waiting to be thrown out once I get tired of them taking up space. We're not real big drinkers....

On Sunday morning I woke up early, while it was still dark out, with a really strange sore throat. Mark was getting over a cold, but I figured this development was just allergies from being outside so much. I got up and made a fire, trying to warm up my freezing toes, and almost catching my shoes on fire in the process. I actually did melt part of Mark's hiking boot...who would have thought those ashes were so hot? (Mark says I'm not very fire savvy, but what does he know anyway?) When the sun finally came up and dried off the dew from our tent, we put out the fire, packed everything up, and started on the journey home. We decided to take a different route back, going through Jemez instead. We stopped for breakfast at Deb's Cafe, sitting in an outdoor patio where we could drink coffee and eat our breakfast burrito and blueberry blue corn pancakes in the shadow of a prickly, desert mountain. It was the worst restaurant service I have ever had up to this point in my life, but the coffee was hot, the food was good, and I, feeling so much less rushed and intentional and so much more content, didn't feel a need to complain.