It seems like Jay and I have been constantly going since we can't remember when. So, this past Sunday we set out on a camping trip to the beach! It’s mid-May so the weather should be perfect and the website showed that we were 300 yards from the beach. It looked like the perfect, relaxing getaway…or so we thought.
First we didn’t have a tent. We lent ours out and couldn’t get it back in time. So, the day before we were set to leave I was scrambling trying to find a cheap tent to buy since we couldn’t find one to borrow. Thankfully some great friends lent us theirs and my mother’s neighbor lent us his. So we went from no tent to two tents in a matter of 2 hours. We took both and Jay decided to use the neighbors since it was a three room tent. We figured one tent for us and one tent for all our junk.
For once, we didn’t get lost, AMAZING, I know! We checked in and were advised that there were raccoons so to just make sure we secure our food. We then drove to our parking space. The tent site we reserved was one that we had to “hike” in to but on the website it looked like it was within eye site of the car and we could walk past it the 300 yards to the beach. Yeah...not so much. We had to go through the woods, down a hill, up a hill and through another campsite to get to ours and it was surrounded by trees and brush. We may have been 300 yards from the beach but the only way we could get there from our site was if we were raccoons.
And speaking of raccoons they were EVERYWHERE and into EVERYTHING! Once we got over the shock of where our site was and had set up camp we put the cooler under the table and all the food in the tent. We decided to go to the beach for an hour or so to start to work on our tans (woot woot). When we got back to our site I walked up on two raccoons trying to get into the cooler and one that had opened the tent, pulled our food out and had eaten our bag of chocolate donuts and started eating our snack bags of Doritos! I shooed them away and we decided that we’d have to secure our food by keeping it in the car. So we packed up all the food and trucked it to the car.
We started a campfire and finally began to relax. Jay decided to go to the car and get our dinner for the night. While he was gone, not 15 feet away. When I looked over at him he just stared at me until I chased him away. I thought that was the end of the raccoons but I was wrong. They came back, getting up to 5 feet away from us the rest of the trip. We ended up having to tie ourselves into the tent each night because they would try to get in after we went to sleep. The second night we were there we had people in the camp next to us and the raccoons tore a hole in their tent while trying to get their food. In the middle of the night Jay heard the man yell, “get out, get out of here! Get OUT!!!! Eff this, we’re leaving”! They left the next morning which they were scheduled to anyway but I don’t think they would have stayed anyway after having tent visitors the night before. As we spent our time there we heard numerous stories of them going into people’s tents, through people’s suitcases and even jumping on top of a grill and through the screen window of a trailer. Needless to say it was not fun shooing them away every few minutes, locking our food in the car and having to hike to get it whenever we were hungry and waking up to the sound of raccoons fighting during the night.
Other than the raccoon infestation, our lantern going out at 11pm and us having to find someone awake to light it for us so we could get back to our site and not have to sleep in the car, a crab nesting in my hair while I took a nap on the beach and the numerous mosquito bites it was a great trip. We even had a doe come to our campsite and graze 5 feet away from us while we chatted.
An adventure to say the least! J
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