Camping Follies

One of the things I dislike about camping in the NW is that you have to book it 9 months in advance or it’s booked. The thing is, life happens. How do you know what you’ll be doing 9 months from now? Well last year, I booked some camping yurt weekends for June in anticipation that we would be packing, house hunting and moving/selling our house in July or August of 2019. Haha. Funny how that works, huh? Turns out life had a different plan and we were house hunting/packing/moving in JUNE instead.

So I ended up cancelling one weekend I booked (at the beach, bummer) but decided to keep our reservation for this past weekend at Lost Lake Campground near Hood River.

We rented a yurt. The weather has been nice but OF COURSE the days leading up to when we were supposed to go it turned iffy. We decide to go anyways, since it was basically our only trip for awhile and I’d been looking forward to it for months. Besides, we were in a yurt, so it shouldn’t be too bad, right?

Well….we got drenched. We arrived and got our keys at the resort lodge and found our yurt in the E Loop. It was kind of far from the lake, which I hadn’t known, I would have picked one closer to the lake. Tip for the future.

So you park your car in a parking lot for the loop and then there is a trail you basically have to hike into with your stuff. Yeah. We didn’t know where our yurt was in the loop and we went the wrong way first so had to double back so the four of us (me, Logan, Michael and Bella) were all running in the DELUGE (I AM NOT KIDDING) and finally found our yurt.

We were all freezing and drenched and inside the yurt realized they had an old cast iron stove inside so we needed to get firewood. We all ran back to the car and then drove back down to the lodge to get firewood. The above photo kinda shows it accurately. We were all soaked to the bone. None of us were dressed properly for the downpour. Our shoes were all soaked all the way through. I had packed my rain jacket in the car and was just in a sweatshirt so that was all soaked. Logan was stoked. He thought it was an adventure. 😉

We got firewood and Michael and Logan started the fire and we tried to warm up and dry off a bit. Then Michael and I took turns doing the trek back and forth from the car to the yurt (they had a gorilla cart in the parking lot for people to use but it was still a lot of work.

And it was raining the whole time.

We got our gear and set up the beds and unpacked stuff. Hung out for a bit. Logan liked climbing the ladder to the top of the bunk beds. 🙂

We had dinner (Michael grilled hot dogs) and hung out some more and then it was getting late and we got ready for bed (knowing Logan would be up very early). We had enough firewood to keep the fire going all night. You just had to get up every 2-3 hours to add more wood or it went out and got pretty cold. It was nice listening to the rain in the forest. It never let up.

The next morning we got up and it was still raining. So we decided to have breakfast and pack up. If it hadn’t been raining we would have stayed the full weekend but I think we were both thinking about 1) how much stuff we had to do at home to get ready for the move and 2) if the weather continued to be nasty, Logan was going to go stir crazy stuck in the yurt.

We drove back to Portland, where it was sunny and warm. 🙂 And after showering, unpacking and having lunch, we went for a hike at Powell Butte:

It was a nice hike. Then home and we all took naps. 🙂 And then I packed the house. 🙂

I’m disappointed with the camping experience. I was so looking forward to it. I think the lesson learned is that anytime we go camping it just needs to be later in the summer when we can kind of rely more on the weather being a little better. And while I loved Lost Lake when I went there for the day before (check out the post I did for better summer pictures!), I am SO not into hauling our crap up a steep hill 1/2 a mile in multiple trips! I had no idea that was the case. I never would have done that. Maybe that makes me a princess but with a toddler, dog and a bunch of crap to haul into the campsite, I’m just not willing to do that. I want to drive up to the site, unload our stuff and be done with it!

Despite Michael’s and my disappointment, Logan was super happy. He loved all of it. He kept talking about camping and hiking all weekend. So that’s the important part. 🙂