One April Saturday, it was unseasonably warm. The DH and I had errands to run, and I was hoping for a weekend on the torch; prospects were good. One of our stops was Wal-Mart so DH could get his fishing license. While we were waiting for the clerk to come to the desk (I think it’s a state-mandated twenty-minute wait, just to make sure you’re really a dedicated fisherman), we were looking around at the camping gear, and debating about getting a new stove, since ours had kicked the bucket on the last camping trip the previous year.
Suddenly, in the middle of debating the pros and cons of just paying for a new propane stove, versus just using the campfire for cooking, DH looks at me and says, Let’s go camping today. And for some reason I will NEVER understand, I said, Okay.
So we ran home and with the efficiency of longtime campers, had the car and cooler packed in 90 minutes, with room left for Dobby. I even remembered to grab his shot records, in case the campground wanted to check them.
Now, the clerk who eventually sold DH his fishing license had apparently mentioned a campground with a decent fishing lake. I had been wandering in Home Goods when this conversation took place, and had no idea what he was talking about. But when we were IN THE CAR, he says he wants to go to this place. No, he doesn’t know exactly where they are, or what they charge, or if they accept pets, or even if they’re open for the season yet.
Smartphone to the rescue! Honestly, I might have gone nuts by now if it weren’t for being able to look up things online while we are out and about. I think the DH’s brain just doesn’t function inside the house, sometimes, like there’s a supermarket-type magic-eye thing that’s at just the right height and it turns his brain off when he comes in. ‘Cause it never fails that we’re pulling out of the driveway before it occurs to him to check the address of where he wants to go.
But I digress.
We headed east toward the State Park, where we know they take pets and are open. I looked up the other campground online, found a phone number and called, and they’re open and amenable to dogs, so we turned the car around and headed west instead. The place turned out to be not far from home, maybe twenty minutes or so.
First thing we noticed when pulling in to the campground is, there’s no apparent office, which is weird for a campground. DH got out and started walking around, and as soon as he was out of sight some dude pulls up on a golf cart and says I can pay him for the site. Okay, whatever, they’re a little informal.
Park the car, get set up, tie Dobby to a bench while we’re doing all this, and immediately he finds a can to chew on. After checking to see that he hadn’t cut up his gums, I took him off his leash to see what would happen. He’d been pretty good in our yard off-leash (which was totally different from my last dog, who would bolt for the street at every opportunity), and there was a big wide field at the campground, so I pulled out his tennis ball and we played fetch for a while.
Our campsite was right on the edge of the 10-acre lake at the campground. There was a little sandy section a ways down, but where we were it was just grass, then a two-inch strip of mud, then lake. Well, at one point the ball rolled to the edge of the water. Dobby chased after it, and stopped. He considered the ball, suddenly noticed the lake, and jumped right in.
I had a screaming fit – so far as I knew, he couldn’t swim. I’d never showed him, right? How would he know how to swim if I hadn’t showed him? (Yes, later it occurred to me what an asinine line of reasoning this was.)
But while I was standing on the shoreline freaking out, Dobby was happily paddling around, just for a few minutes, and came right back when DH called him. Came out, did the shaking thing, and by that point I had stopped hyperventilating.
So how do you dry off a wet dog? We were only staying overnight, and hadn’t brought along shower supplies (e.g., towels). It was warm and sunny (which prompted the whole trip anyway), so I put him in the warmest, driest place I could think of – the back of the car. So while he dried off in the hatchback-oven, I took a better look at the campground.
I won’t go into detail, but suffice it to say that if you ever murder a bunch of people and want a place to hide with no questions asked and easy access to escape, this is the place to go.
As I said before, no office here. They don’t ask you to sign anything, register your car or otherwise record your presence like other places do. They only take cash. The tent sites aren’t marked — just pitch it any old place. There’s derelict vehicles and campers and trailers everywhere. We didn’t expect a crowded campground, it being the middle of April, but I think there were MAYBE a dozen other people there, and they just gave off this vibe like — let’s just say, had I asked one of them to name the president, they might have said Nixon.
I didn’t spot any dead bodies, but I suspect they’re at the bottom of the lake. DH kept catching what looked like the same little panfishes, and I think it’s because they WANTED to be caught, so they didn’t have to look at all the bodies in the lake anymore.
The campground is situated between the turnpike and another major highway, so in addition to the terrific noise level at night (to cover the screams of anyone you kill while you’re there, or the noise of whoever is tied up in your car trunk), you have easy access to a highway that will get you out of town quickly.
When I happened to remember that the campground in the Friday the 13th movies was ‘Camp Crystal Lake,’ and this place was ‘Crystal Springs Campground,’ I could not leave fast enough.
We successfully kept Dobby out of the water the rest of the time we were there, not that he didn’t try.
The moral of the story is: NEVER take campground recommendations from the dude who sells you a fishing license at Wal-Mart.