our vacation, day 1 into day 2

We drove a little more than halfway to Vegas on Saturday and spent the first night camping at Lake Success near Porterville. We arrived at the tail end of sunset and it was quite serene there; the sun had made it over the other side of the hills, a few boats were still in the water, a warm breeze... no sweater necessary. We started to set up our camp. Alex had the brilliant idea of bringing the Aerobed with us (because the Matrix has a 115 volt outlet) so after we set up the tent we pulled the car over, put the Aerobed in the tent, plugged it in to the Matrix and voila! Now were officially un-campers posing as campers. It was extremely comfortable and I don't ever want to camp without it, I guess I'm less outdoorsy than I've led on. (we were in a tent and did use sleeping bags on the Aerobed, doesn't that count for something?) We started a fire and were about to cook some hot dogs and that's when problem #2 arose (problem #1 being my temporarily lost, but actually washed wallet).

I was looking for the skewers and other camping gear and couldn't seem to find anything except the lantern and the single propane burner. I asked Alex where everything was and he told me I could find what I was looking for in the green backpack. What Alex had forgotten while packing the car was that at the end of last camping season we had re-packed all our gear into a handy waterproof Rubbermaid container. We decided to leave the green backpack for all things propane. I asked Alex where I could find the blue plastic container and he said "doh". Thus came the discovery that we were at a disadvantage, especially if we chose to do further camping on the trip. But we did have a cooler, a lantern, a tent, sleeping bags (and an Aerobed) and that was enough for now. So we used a Swiss Army knife to cook our hot dogs. We sat at the fire, split a Guinness and had a lot of fun melting some Oreos to see what would happen. They glow kind of purple if you leave them on the fire long enough. We also enjoyed watching the family across the road from us, there was a pre-teen girl who was working on some sort of pop and lock routine to a Britney Spears song which she mumbled under her breath.

As we watched the fire die down the serene lake setting came to a screeching halt. The campsite of hard core spring breakers who positioned themselves behind us began to blare bad music and crack open a bunch of cheap beer around 9:00pm. That continued until about 11:00, or longer, I'm not sure, because miraculously I was able to sleep. I woke up a few times around 2:00 or 3:00 due to the yelping of a young woman, but all in all it was pretty comfortable and warm there.

Alex and I woke up around 5:00am on Sunday and decided to pack up and hit the road. This was good for two reasons: 1. we now didn't have to pay for the campsite and 2. the motorboats started squealing around the lake at this time.
Off we went, stopping at a Denny's at around 7:00 for breakfast, finding ourselves under-dressed compared to the pre and post church crowds we encountered. Our waitress had gastric bypass surgery about a year ago. I know this because she openly discussed it with the perfumed woman sitting in the booth behind us. Perfume lady was only having a vanilla latte, while her husband and child ate eggs, sausage, bacon and toast. I felt sad for her. That Denny's had the best french toast.