Danette and I took the dogs out past Culpeper to a private campground to do some “Boondocking” this weekend. (What is Boondocking you ask? scroll down past the photos) The campground was essentially a cleared spot next to a small river in a wooded section of someones farm. I’ve been interested in trying to find a place where the dogs could run a bit and try some winter camping. So on Monday we pulled up the Hipcamp app to look for what’s out there (think Airbnb for people with huge yards: farms and gigantic wooded lots, etc.). We settled on a decent looking spot that allowed dogs and booked a night. Like I said, I’ve been into the idea that a more secluded spot would let our (insane) dogs to be dogs and get “off leash” for once in their lives. This turned out to be perfect for that. This location had 3 spots and we were the only ones there, so we let the dogs go. Well, not totally. We followed them around like helicopter moms and worried that at any point they would see a deer or a weirdo wandering in the woods and we’d be effed! But, it worked out they even got to romp around and chase sticks in the river. (Dog heaven). This was also the first time we had ever used our camper without an electric hook up. It got down into the thirties but we have a propane heater in the popup so were toasty all night. (yeah we still have a heater! We aren’t animals!)
I woke up at 4:57am the next morning to the sound of rain on the roof and spent an hour kicking myself for a) not checking the weather even once (!) and b) leaving just about everything outside…ugh. Dreading the prospect of packing everything up during a rain storm I sat in bed and stared at the sky willing the sun to come up so I could get started. finally the sky was light enough to see so I went out and….it was snow! still cold enough to not make everything wet, we dusted everything off packed up and hit the road. Dodged a bullet there. (Of course I took no pictures – still working on taking more pics). Here are the pics I did take.
So putting this post together I also learned that what we were doing was called “Dry Camping” – that is camping in an RV without hookups. We thought we were doing the much cooler sounding, “Boondocking”. But apparently it’s only “Boondocking” if you are dry camping on public land with no designated campsites.
Other stuff:
- Sports:
- I’ve been enjoying the Wizards super weird team this year through the ups and downs. The Unicorn has been balling since he came back from injury the past couple weeks and the Panda seems to be coming into form as well (minus a tooth). Should be a mildly more interesting post season this year (?)
- Speaking of missing teeth, my boy Tyler Adams from Leeds United lost some teeth(??) this weekend against Manchester United! Gah, I hope he’s just a little bloody.
- Drawing still working on the Frozen North finale. Side tracked myself with this piece instead and working on my DnD campaign.
- TV/Movies:
- Troll (Netflix, RT89%?) Kaiju movie out of Scandinavia – it’s a giant troll! I’ve been eyeing this on Netflix and saw the decent RT rating so give it a whirl. Apparently I should have looked at the audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes: only 46%. This was a hard “meh” for me. Flat characters low stakes, low budget. I liked some of the story elements but it just wasn’t big, cool or scary enough. If you’ve never heard of King Kong of Godzilla than fine…but Troll didn’t do much for this old monster lover. I much preferred Troll Hunter (2010) to this and recommend that one if you just want to get your Troll fix.
- Reading:
- Getting caught up on Saga (Brian K Vaughn and Fiona Staples) The creative team took a year off and I added 6 more months but now I have a nice chunk of books to read. Great series!
- Diary of a Misfit, Casey Parks – This is a strange one I picked from another “best of 2022” lists – Non-fiction story about the authors time investigating an old family story of young girl who was abducted in order to be saved from an abusive family, but then raised as a man by her new family. I’m about 50 pages in and it’s not totally grabbing me yet. But I’ll stick with it for a little bit longer. Here’s a better summary from Casey Parks’ website
