Good Morning all,
Okay I’m feeling a little bit more like a human being so I figure it’s time to share the details on my trip to Stokes.
We decided to pull our kids out of school a little early to make sure we could make the 2.5 hour trip and arrive before the major traffic and darkness.
So I took the day off and spent the morning packing up my wife’s blazer and running last minute errands. We are all supposed to meet at the one school and leave right from there. My wife got my kids from school at 1:30 and they changed, went to the bathroom and we’re in the blazer ready to go at 1:55 with the meeting place about a 4 minute drive…things are running smooth as silk!
NOT!
The blazer’s battery decided to die and I can’t get the stupid thing started. I figure I can probably jump it but then would have to jump it everytime we wanted to use it during the trip. So I get on the phone call one of the other guys and tell him what’s going on and that I need some room in his pickup for my cooler, my big plastic box of cooking supplies and my big old two burner stove.
While i’m waiting on him to arrive I empty out the blazer and shove everything into my little Hyundai Elantra. He shows up and takes my stuff and off we go with a quick stop at the gast station.
Off we go!
It’s a pretty smooth trip until we get onto Rt. 80. It seems that there was some sort of a Hazardous Materials spill and it had all 3 lanes closed off. So after sitting dead stop for an hour one of the other guys grabs an old fashioned road map and takes us through some backwoods county roads and we finally get there after almost 4 hours on the road!
We get checked while all 8 of the kids are relieving themselves into the woods (can you imagine 8 kids between 6 and 10 not going to the bathroom for almost 4 hours!) and off we go to our lean-to’s. The lean-to’s at Stokes are really mini-cabins with 4 walls, a floor, a ceiling and a wood burning stove but they were absolutely perfect for this weekend. The three of them were about 50 yards apart and I ended up grabbing the central one that become our center of activities for the weekend.
We spent about an hour unpacking and setting up and started cooking dinner. We decided on a nice easy dinner of burgers, dogs and mac and cheese which made all the kids extremely happy. We spent the remainder of the evening just basically hanging out around the campfire and telling stories and just enjoying being just the guys which of course means there was lots of burping and farting going on!
Saturday morning we were up around 7 and cooks eggs and sausage with bagels and pop tarts which again all the kids loved! Some of the kids had never had scrambled eggs cooked “camping style” before which just means the eggs were cooked over the campfire in the same cast iron skillet that we cooked the sausage in using the sausage grease. They loved it!
After cleaning up and goofing off for awhile we headed out. There is a 9 mile section of the Appalachian Trail that goes through Stokes and we decided to hike about half of it. We dropped off one car at the bottom and took the other 2 cars up to the top of Sunrise Mountain so that we were only hiking downhill and would be able to retrieve the two vehicles later.
After only about a half mile of the journey it became very apparent that my younger son was not going to be able to make the journey. The combination of the height, the downhill angle and the terrain itself were too much for him. So we left my older son with the group and he and I cut through the forest and back to the main road for an easier decent. Little did we know that it was actually a 7 mile walk on the road instead of a 4 mile walk on the trail. It took us about 90 minutes but we eventually made it back to the car and actually beat the rest of the group!
We then headed back to the campgrounds and cooked crab, little neck clams, a couple of rib-eyes and a huge 5 pound beef tenderloin for dinner. We somewhat cleaned up and just spent the remainder of the evening enjoying the beautiful scenery and the comaraderie.
Sunday morning we were up again around 7 and had eggs, bacon and the remaining bagels and pop-tarts for breakfast. We kind of just putzed around the campground till about 11 with the plan of taking a short non-vertical 1.5 mile hike and then heading home.
On our way out we stopped at the rangers station and actually booked two of the 8 person cabins on the lake for next years trip after checking them out. At this point everybody was starting to wind down and we ended up deciding against the hike and headed home.
This has got to be one of the best camping trips I have been on in awhile! Good friends, good food and lots and lots of good fun. I’m already looking forward to next years trip and it’s still 11 months away!
‘Till Next Time…Remember “There Ain’t No Better Camping Then New Jersey Camping!”
Eric
