Average Jane Camps Out – Part 2

On Saturday morning at about 5 o’clock, we were sleeping relatively peacefully in the tent when suddenly a noisy bird squawked a couple of times. This, in turn, awakened a member of the Midwestern Rednecked Jackass species that had been camped nearby. It prompted hoarse recitations of the creature’s many and varied cries, beginning with a simple, but loudly echoing, “Yah-hoooooo!” and proceeding through, “I’m DRUNK!”, “Wake up you [expletive deleted]!”, “Whoooooooo!” Then a portable stereo entered the equation and we were treated to an off-key, karaoke-style rendition of Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind.”

From across the tent, I heard my sister say, “You’ve gotta be frickin’ kidding me.”

My brother-in-law looked out of the tent and informed us that the specimen in question had been sleeping (passed out?) in the bed of a pickup truck while his camping buddies slept in tents nearby. We had a brief discussion about how if we’d happened to have access to a high-powered rifle, it might just be possible to pick off the yeller from this distance without revealing the direction from which the shot had come.

My sister, who’d slept poorly all night long thanks to an inadequately inflated air mattress, informed us that there had only been a couple of hours of silence before this from the loud party across the campground, who were now all waking up, making noise, and blithely dropping f-bombs within earshot of my four-year-old niece (who was, luckily, still asleep).

Since it was obvious that our sleeping time was over, we got up and began preparing breakfast. My sister had brought an A/C adapter for the car, along with an electric skillet, and the plan was to cook scrambled eggs in the skillet, fry bacon on a griddle over the campfire, and warm up biscuits and sausage gravy on the propane grill. That plan hit a major snag when the A/C adapter failed to work. We tried it in N.’s car and it still didn’t work. We later discovered that it had blown the fuses for both cars’ cigarette lighters and taken out N.’s radio fuse, to boot.

With the electric skillet out of the picture, we had to get creative. Fortunately, we had extra aluminum loaf pans, so we sprayed one with Pam, filled it with scrambled egg, and set it on the propane grill next to the tin of sausage gravy. The grill warmed up the gravy until it bubbled and baked the eggs nicely. The first attempts at making bacon over the campfire resulted in a few charred pieces, but we got the hang of it after a while. All in all, it was a delicious breakfast, made even better as we basked in our resourcefulness.

Tomorrow’s installment: Rafting down a lazy river