Planet Geek!: Pittsburgh Road Trip, Day 2

July 17, 2006

Pittsburgh Road Trip, Day 2

(Written saturday on the Treo - typos may abound...)

All set up! If I had my druthers I think i'd have preferred something less than 85+ degrees and 90% humidity with occasional rain squalls for setup day, but ya takes what yas can git.

Parking last night in town was tricky. Where do you park 30' of vehicle+trailer in a small city? We managed to find a sidestreet and with a silent hope the house we parked in front of didn't contain the type of family that lay claim to the strip of concrete that happens to be in front of their house, we trooped back to blk's place. I remembered to bring the battery pack in for the night and, making sure all my gadgets were plugged in and recharging, we turned in for the night.

Thurs morning found the van and trailer untouched and we hauled it around to the house to load up. The event site wasn't open for setup until noon, so we lounged about until it was time to go. Driving time was about an hour and a half, so, after picking up lunch, we hit the road.

The site is sort of rolling hills. Going by what blk has said I was expecting to be the only non-tent but we ended up flanked by a pair of land zeppelins to one side (one of which ran a generator all night) and another popup on the other. Several small tent pavilions were set up as well.

We got the trailer situated back in the trees and unhitched just in time for the next rainshower. There are few greater joys than setting up a camper trailer during rain (note sarcasm). It actually went fine... The trick was not dumping water on the beds as the 'wings' were opened. Success on that front. After the trailer was set up I installed the battery into the trailer power system and lo! We had lights! Our domicile was complete.

A lot of my fears about noise and heat and neighbors et al remained mercifully unfulfilled. A couple key points do come up though...

Camping with 100 folks mostly falling into the 40-60 yr old crew is vastly different than camping with the 20-40 crew. The most noticeable metric is come 1am? Everyone is in bed asleep. Compared with my other group camping experience, this is unheard of. Far be it for me to complain.

We're almost in West Virginia, which means the area is very urban and doesn't suffer from the 'there are pockets of wilderness' problem common to New England. Here you can drive for hours and see only hills and forests and valleys with occasional farms.

The drawback with being in the 'country', or at least this crew here, is the food tends to the basics of 'hearty, heavy, and plentiful'. On the one hand, its food I like so I'm certainly not starving. On the other, I feel like I should go jogging for an hour after each meal. Maybe I'm just not made out to be a glutton.

The privately owned campsite has been built up through several years of events and now sports several fixed buildings and a very well designed shower / water system - a large shower area with several garden hose type hand sprays, hooked up to 2000 gallons of trucked in water and a gas on demand water heater, all on a poured concrete floor. For camping showers, it doesn't get much better :)

All in all things have been good, modulo the normal bits regarding camping in July. Thursday was quite humid, but got down to tolerable at night, thankfully. No wet clothes, no searing heat, insects at tolerable levels (apparently due to a fairly aggressive spraydown the site gets a week before the event).