Second Camping Experience Part 1: Don't Feed the Skunks

You'll note one the the badges on my blog basically says don't make me mad, or I'll blog about you.  Too bad the guy I'm going to write about today didn't know that.  Actually, even if he did know, I bet he wouldn't have cared.   

We had our second family comping experience last weekend at the Jellystone in Portage, Indiana.  We loaded the Mommy Mobile up with all our supplies and arrived at 2:00 their time, as they are an hour behind us.  (Which is really stupid if you ask me.  We're in the same state!)   We got all checked in and followed the map to our site.  This is what greeted us:



At this point, I texted my sister in law and said maybe I'm not a camping kind of person afterall and was about to cry.   Apparently, the previous site tenant figured the check out time wasn't really a set time, and he could just stay until he wanted to leave.  Around the site, there were at least four dozen empty beer cans, a ton of trash (as you can see), a tent, food remnants, some fishing poles, and some bait.  A few minutes later, the tenant rolled up in his car (spray painted black) and was sporting what looked like a very fresh black eye and he and his friends were all slurring their words.  Needless to say, I was glad we'd called the main office prior to their arrival and they sent an employee out to supervise the clean up efforts. 

While cleaning up the tenant kept saying that he'd paid good money for him and 13 of his friends to camp in this tent:

Now, that I'd have paid money to see.  I had a tent like that in high school, and it was cramped with just two people and their sleeping bags in it!  I can't imagine how you'd fit 14 people, especially since the tenant and his friends weren't small men, but whatever.

His last parting words were that he'd fed a skunk a package of hot dogs the night before and that kept it occupied.  Um, obviously, the guy with "handie man" spelled wrong in spray paint on his car didn't realize you aren't supposed to feed wildlife if you want them to stay away.  Clearly, he was absent that day in Boy Scouts or they just didn't cover it as well as we did in Girl Scouts.  As he left, the camp employee sighed and said, "Don't feed any animals," just to be sure we knew it was a bad idea or couldn't read the camp rules that said exactly that.

The people on the site next to us didn't speak any English, but I'm pretty sure their looks said "Thank goodness you people came, because we couldn't deal with Handie Man and his friends another night."  What mattered most was that the boys were still excited about camping.  We managed to get our tent set up in record time and then went off to explore.  More on that later!
 

The boys outside our tent- that probably could fit 14!