Camping Adventure

Last summer, I had some health problems and I didn't get out much. This summer, I'm itching to go out and do as much STUFF as I can! So, on Day 2 of vacation, Mom, Dad and I headed out into the middle of nowhere. It was awesome! I took a lot of pictures, as usual. Here is a small sampling:

Our campsite had a sleeping area, a dining area and a cooking area:
(Also, Dad made a lounge-on-a-tarp-in-the-shade-and-read area, but I didn't take a picture of it)

We had a potty area, too, of course.
Mom and I decided that if we were going to be camping for two nights, we needed better facilities. So I went to Emergency Essentials and invested in a potty seat that goes on a 5-gal bucket. It made life a lot easier. :)

We ate some good food (Dad even made dutch oven bread, which we turned into French Toast the next morning):
And I got to practice some cool photography tricks, like bracketing:
(Okay, the first picture is just straight from my camera. I used bracketing with the middle and end pictures--two exposures that I merged together later on in Photoshop)

I finally put my telephoto lens to good use and played wildlife photographer:
You'll have to blow up the first picture up to actually see the wildlife--there are some deer, from a very far distance. The little squirrel-like creature in the center is a potgut (said Dad). They were everywhere, and it quickly turned into a fun game to chase after them and see how close I could get with my camera. I got pretty good:

This little guy sat there and let me take like a dozen pictures of him. I actually got bored before he did! The stuff the potgut is eating in the two pictures above? Stinging Nettle, which I managed to experience 5 - 6 times over the course of the two days we spent camping. I can spot it pretty easily now.

(Other fun things we experienced: TICKS. I killed at least a dozen, probably more. Mosquito bites! Sunburn! YAAAY fun!)

And then there was the whole reason we went camping that particular weekend:
The red you see on the trees is from my headlamp. It was in night mode and I forgot to turn it off before taking the shot. Ever since I got my new camera and started looking at other people's pictures--especially ones of the night sky--I've been obsessed with seeing the Milky Way. This campsite was FINALLY dark enough to see it, although it was still faint. I could see some vague cloudy shapes, and it wasn't until I left my camera's shutter open for 30 seconds while trained on a patch of sky that I thought was part of the Milky Way that some of the detail came out.


The night sky is really incredible. My one regret is that I wasn't brave enough to venture out further to get a better shot--the Milky Way was reaching across the southeastern sky, which was mostly obscured by trees from our campsite. The first night, all three of us woke up at 2:30am and walked out to get a better look (but I didn't bring my camera, because I'm stupid or something). The next night, I had my camera out, but Mom and Dad were sleeping and an owl or some other creepy creature was in the woods making noise, and I'm 27 and still scared of the dark. So there.

If I HAD been braver, I would've spent more time experimenting with different settings--higher ISO, larger aperture. There's only so much you can do with shutter speed--Earth is orbiting, so the stars move about every 15 seconds. If I were to leave the shutter open for a really long time, I would have a picture of star trails (which would be cool too, but not what I was going for).

On the way in and out of our campsite, we saw something very nostalgic:

Sheep! Thankfully none of them visited us at our campsite, although we did meet their Peruvian shepherd and his three cute dogs. And there were also the camouflaged guard dogs that stay with the herds and bark a lot when you drive by. They were pretty cute. It was a very fun trip, and I can't wait to go again!