> Seventh Trip

Revised Feb 3rd/05  

Tom's Lake George Site  Camping Stories

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Our seventh trip

    1997 marked our seventh camping trip to Lake George. On this trip we returned to the Adirondack Camping Village. With our daughter now being 2 years old we felt she was ready for camping in a tent. This was NOT a perfect trip, and we learned once again that no matter how smart you think you are, you never know everything. All in all though, I don't remember any real bad experiences. I think the worst part of this trip was the MAJOR storm that developed the morning we were leaving. We spent the next morning breaking down camp in the pouring rain, trying to keep things as dry as possible (especially the inside of my van). Let me tell you what we tried to do. First of all, we tried to get everything under the tarps. Then we backed the van up as close to the tarp over our tent as possible. We finished packing everything up underneath the tarp. Then we started taking down the tent with the tarp still in place. We used tent poles, sticks, and anything else that was handy to prop the tarp up in the middle, once the tent was down. Then we tried to roll the tent up under the tarp without getting it wet. By this time it was raining so hard that there were streams of water running along the ground under the tarp where we were working. We managed to do a pretty good job of keeping the tent dry, but that was about it. Everything got soaked as we were carrying it to the van, and I don't have to tell you how wet the tarps were. We wound up packing the tarps in the van wet, on top of everything else. My van HAD this light gray upholstery. We never did get the dirt off of it. Luckily it was pretty old, and torn, and we needed to reupholster it anyway. Now we have several Rubbermaid plastic storage bins. If we need to pack something in the van wet, we put the bin in first, then load the wet stuff in the bin. We make sure we have the bins in the van the night before we break camp. This way the water stays in the bin until we get home, then we unpack it outside. Any way, when we got home we had a LOT of cleaning to do, both in the van, and our camping gear which was wet and stinky.