Wow that weekend was exhausting.  That’s one of those where you need to get back to work to rest up from having fun.  We took off east-bound on Friday, destination Sly Park Lake for a little camping trip.  The facility is very nice, if grossly over-priced.  I guess I should just accept that everything out here is grossly over-priced and get on with it.  Some things just really jump out though, like the camping prices.  They gouged us $50 per night, and that was an unimproved tent spot.  No electricity, no water, and a two-door outhouse.  If that wasn’t bad enough, they dinged us an extra $15 per night for a second vehicle!  Geez man.  Apparently they can get away with it though, as the place was completely full.  As a matter of fact, it’s always completely full, we had to book our site last year.  Well, cost aside, we had a great time.  Our friends Michael & Alaina joined us and we proceeded to… well…. camp.  The lack of amenities made it feel almost Float-Trip-esque, and that was compounded by setting up my ancient relic of a tent from my floating days.  Munkirs and I got that tent somewhere around 1991, and we got a lot of use out of it.  It probably hasn’t been set up in the last 7 or 8 years though, and I was a little nervous that it would just go up in a puff of dust when I unrolled it.  It was in fine shape though, if a little musty.  Luckily I anticipated that situation and had a bottle of Febreeze handy for  good dousing.

Saturday brought more camping.  We started the day off with a solid casserole, appropriately prepared over the fire in foil packets.  For that matter, we cooked pretty much everything all weekend in foil packets…  Kind of hard to go wrong.  After breakfast we took the short walk from the campground to the lake (about 20 yards) and set up the big island float for a day of relaxing.  Just like last weekend, we managed to turn it into an entire day.  I guess we’re pretty easily amused.  We bobbed around the lake all day, then enjoyed a nice dinner of bbq ribs.  In foil packets.

Sunday we got up and ate breakfast, then packed up camp.  We were getting a little grungy from all the dust, and a nice shower at home was in order.  Not to mention, the temp was going up rapidly, it was obvious that it was going to turn into a scorcher.  For evening entertainment we had some friends over for a “vertical tasting.”  That’s some kind of “thing” out here.  Over some amount of time, we’ve collected six different vintages of the same wine from one of our favorite places out here, so we all sat around and tasted each and then discussed in detail the different nuances of each year.  I think we all agreed “Yep, they taste like wine.  Red wine.”  It was fun though, and I grilled up some ribeyes that came out pretty well to go along with it.