Camping!

Wow, been a while. Well, I've been pretty busy the past couple weeks, mostly preparing for the LEAF's camping trip this weekend. But I started rereading the Harry Potter series! It's a nice way to unclog my brain; it's an easy read and a familiar story, so it really is very relaxing. Better than sitting away in front of a TV or on the computer.

This week is Long Weekend! Yay! I get to go home on Thursday!!! But it's going to be a horrible week, and so will be the week after. >:( This week I have to fix up a paper, read 100p for Archaeology on Tuesday, finish a book and write a 5p paper on it for Wednesday, and memorize a poem in German and possibly also write another paper for Archaeology for Thursday. I also have to collect the remaining research for my archaeology colloquium presentation for Nov. 6, so I have to work on reading all that research over Long Weekend. Then I have to write about 10 pages on it and make a 15 minute presentation for Thursday. Friday is my GRE in Harrisburg, which I have yet to prepare for, Friday night is the concert in Philly with Cassie (yay!), and Saturday morning Denise, Melissa, and I are leaving at 7am to go on Lyco's semesterly trip to NYC for a Broadway show. I'm going to be so beat. Luckily, though, there are only 4 weeks after Long Weekend before finals. Then I get 4 whole weeks off for Christmas break! Yay! They're going to be killer because I have to also finish applying for grad schools by Dec 1. *rips out hair* Thank God I got my $400 refund check from the school. That's all going to fund all those application fees! $75 for Johns Hopkins and $70 each for UCLA, University of Michigan, and UPenn. And there goes all of my refund check! Yay!!!! Thank God I have a campus job, or else I'd be so poor. $25 a week isn't so bad when all you need to spend that on is some grocery shopping and the occassional 6-pack.

But anyways, I'm giving myself a panic attack. This weekend was both fun and a complete disaster. We set our LEAF Camping Trip for this weekend at Hickory Run State Park Campground. Everything was all set up, forms filled out, and everything paid for. At 5pm Denise and I went out to the pre-set meeting place (Acedemic Center Parking lot) for Enterprise to drop off our two rental mini-vans (we had 20 people going on the trip...). We waited and waited and waited for about 20 minutes and called Melissa to have her call Enterprise to see what the hold up was. Meanwhile, Eric and Jordan arrived with a bunch of camping gear. They said that most people were already waiting in the AC with their stuff and were wondering what was going on. Melissa calls back saying that Enterprise claimed to have already dropped off two mini-vans at 3:30pm and gave them to someone named Denise, but never bothered to check their drivers licence to make sure. We were livid. We had 20 people waiting to go camping (we were already planning on setting up in the dark) but only a sedan and a small SUV (our other modes of transport) to take them all in and hold all the camping gear. We went through an hour and a half long ordeal of figuring out what went wrong.

If Denise or I had been on the phone with Enterprise, there would have been a lot of yelling. Luckily, Melissa was calling, and she never gets aggressive. Turns out there was another group on campus who had asked Enterprise for two mini-vans for the weekend, and they thought it was the same group (WHAAAAT?!?!?!). Though they still would have gipt someone because they would have had double the money. Seems that they weren't willing to let people know that and were very willing to keep every penny of that. Finally, after much aggrevation, they said they would provide us with a mini-van and two cars and would give us a partial refund. Damn straight. They're just lucky we had enough people 21 or over to put names on the cars. So we didn't get to the campground until 9pm to set up our 4 campsites. Though that went pretty fast.

The forecast for the weekend started as snow, then just changed to really really cold and rain. Oh well, we decided to go for it anyways. Some rain isn't too bad when camping as long as you keep everything away from the sides of the tent. We woke up early Saturday with a steady rain coming down and we put up one of the tarps so we had a dry place for cooking. Two tents claimed minor flooding: the girls in the one had everything up against the walls of the tent (guess we forgot to mention that bit to everyone, oops), but Eric and Jordan actually had some flooding. However, their tent fly wasn't actually for that tent, so the rain came right in from the top. The other 3 tents were dry. So we thought we'd just squeeze Eric and Jordan into other tents and do some emptying of the other tent. It seemed pretty fixable for our second night.

The rain kept going in and out, slowing down, picking up, really coming down, almost stopping competely. It wasn't too bad, we could do it. We forgot a few things for cooking, so Denise and Jordan decided that after breakfast they would go find a supply store while everyone else went out hiking. Even though it rained, it was really pretty. In fact, I thought the rain was quite pleasant. Except that then we realized we had a defective mini-van. The trunk door was in permanent lock position and we couldn't get it to close, no matter what we tried. We ended up having to tying closed. Stupid Enterprise. I'm never renting from them ever again. Eric didn't want to go hiking, so he provided transport and then turfing in the rental car. haha. Seriously.

After a peanut butter and jelly lunch with apples and bananas, we decided to see what had come of Denise and Jordan's exploration and decide what to do from there. The rain started to come down a little harder but we thought it would still be ok. Denise and Jordan said they'd get dinner started early (seeing as it took us like 2 to 3 hours to cook breakfast for everyone) while we went to go see the Boulder Fields! As we drove, it rained harder and harder and harder, until we finally got to the Boulder Fields and actually could barely see out our windshield. My car became very worried and we were debating going back and suggesting that we should pack up and leave after dinner. Rain came down harder and harder as we trecked back and a few times we swore we saw lightning. When we got back to the sites, all the people who stayed behind were no where to be seen. So we sat in the van for a bit deciding who would go out and check the tents to see if they were taking shelter.

Turns out they took shelter in the cars. Jordan and Denise came up and I immediately rolled down my window and said, "I think we should leave." Jordan had called one of his friends to check the weather and it called for torential downpours and thunderstorms. That clinched it. We were all already a little wet from our hikes, so we took off the driest of our clothes and left them in the cars while we ran out into a complete downpour. I was soaked to the bone with puddles in my shoes in 30 minutes. We didn't even bother putting tents in bags, we just rolled and threw them into cars. It was qutie amusing, actually. When the cars were packed, we all drove back half naked (because we didn't have time to check which bags were whose to get dry clothes), barely seeing the road and hydroplaning. Luckily everyone was in very good spirits still.

It made for a very interesting weekend. But we were all very glad to come back early. We felt bad about coming back too late for everyone to have dinner in the caf, so we cooked what we were originally making at Denise and Melissa's apartment for everyone, made some posters for a speaker event this week, worked on puzzles, and watched Constantine on TV. Everyone agreed that this was much nicer. haha. And it also meant that everyone got to sleep in this morning instead of packing up a campsite.

But now I'm going to work on my piles of homework. I just wanted to update since I haven't done that in a while and I had quite an adventurful weekend. haha. Now, work time...