We celebrated Mr. Katie’s birthday a few weeks ago with our 2nd Annual Birthday Camping Trip to Hickory Run State Park. It is one of our favorite Pennsylvania State Parks and one of our most loved places.
I even wrote about our camping trip to Hickory Run on this blog last year.
Mr. Katie’s special day luckily has fallen, this year and last, on the weekend before school starts. It’s a great time to be there because as I said, it is one of our favorite places and it is my husband’s birthday weekend. The weekend of this trip is also the last weekend before school starts so the trip has a feeling of finality of summer. It is a bittersweet feeling. On one hand, it an exciting trip because Hickory Run contains so many awesome different elements and you can relish the fact that it is still summer and nobody, not even the local school district can take that away from you.
Yet, at the same time, sometimes you catch yourself thinking about how the school year is less than 2 days away. You find yourself being keenly aware that the weekend is kind of summer’s last hurrah, minus Labor Day weekend of course, which has never felt like summer vacation since school has always started before Labor Day in your world.
Taking a camping trip the weekend before school starts makes me feel like I am getting away with something, like I am snatching the last bit of summer before it is taken away from me. Yet going away the weekend before school also has its own challenges. Hello, getting new backpacks ready. Hello, making sure all the important school online forms are taken care of.
Also, to up the difficulty factor for myself one more level, my older son’s school starts bright and early Monday morning and we get home from our trip late Sunday afternoon.
Last year, I found myself feeling fairly relaxed during the trip because we had never camped at Hickory Run before. Everything that happened felt like a fun surprise. There were no expectations on my children’s part about what might happen or what we might do. This year was different.
They have a lot of their own ideas now and don’t mind sharing. All Mr. Man could talk about was when and where were we going fishing? Preschool Nugget definitely has his own ideas too right now. He is going through a kind of wild-card stage where he might willingly participate in our planned activities or he might just lay down on the ground and not move.
Before we even left for the trip I had some tension in my bones. Not only did I need to be prepared for school starting on Monday but I wanted to show my family that I was ready for a fun weekend, it being Mr. Katie’s birthday weekend and all. Then when I was rushing around to get ready for our trip, I was visited by the pigeon who won’t leave me alone as I wrote about earlier. After my big bird trauma, I was carrying some tension.
But luckily when we got to the park, there were no hitches in our plans. The boys seemed to be in good spirits and we had no trouble getting to the park, backing the camper into the campsite, and getting it set up. The only thing that threw me for a loop a little bit was the stern reminder from the park check-in clerk to remember to keep all food and odorous items such as toothpaste and deodorant locked inside the car at night as well as a reminder to lock up all food and food trash anytime we left our campsite because of bears.
She said bears had been very active this summer and there were many sightings.
So yay! Bears!
I do not know how I forgot about the bears at Hickory Run. In retrospect, I remember a different clerk telling me the same things last summer and giving me the same flier about locking up food and of course there were all those fancy bear proof lockers and garbage cans.
I like bears as much as the next gal, but this was going to up the difficulty level of the camping trip one more notch.
Anyway, not long after the warning, I relaxed a little and we had a nice, uneventful night. We talked the boys into taking a little hike and they didn’t complain too much. Our moods weren’t even dampened when the sky decided to open and pour while we were brushing our teeth in the bathhouse, with a rainy hike back to our campsite ahead of us. The sound of rain on the camper that night made for a heavenly aural experience for sleeping that night. We didn’t realize how good we had it when we slept that night.
The next day was Mr. Katie’s birthday and the rain stopped sometime over the night. We had an amazing mid-morning hike, where we finally found the Stametz Dam.
In the afternoon, we went fishing which is a new hobby for us. We only recently started fishing and if we ever catch anything, I will surely write an animal encounter focused blog entry on how that went down.
After fishing, Mr. Katie started cooking his own birthday dinner. Don’t object. We went out for breakfast. He chose the menu on his birthday and insisted on cooking this dinner. He cooked the same meal that we had last year for his Hickory Run birthday trip, Bacon Cheeseburgers. In our house, Mr. Katie is the usual cheeseburger chef. Mr. Man even said in the past, “Mommy makes okay hamburgers but they aren’t as good as Daddy’s.”
Unfortunately, there were some mishaps while he was cooking and about half a package of bacon ended up being spilled on the ground under the camp stove. He picked the bacon off the ground promptly as to not attract any bears but don’t sleep on this mishap it comes up later in the story.
Luckily, half the package of bacon remained and he was still able to cook bacon cheeseburgers. Then we sang, eat birthday cake, and roasted s’mores. We adults managed to put all the food away back in the car by the time the boys went to bed after dark. We even put the trash bag in the car. We really were taking the bear warning seriously.
Still after dark is when the animal action started to heat up . .
Once the boys were asleep, Mr. Katie and I sat around the fire and sipped totally state park legal beverages. That is when I saw a small dark shadow come out from the grass that bordered the edge of our campsite just to the left of our campfire. It was a spot not far from where Mr. Katie dropped the bacon.
I shined a flashlight on the spot and saw a small raccoon. I said “Scat” in a menacing way. The racoon didn’t move an inch. It just looked at me. It looked almost friendly. I love raccoons. I used to collect stuffed animal raccoon when I was a child. To me they look like cute little friends but I know that they have no compunction against biting and can carry rabies.
When the small racoon ignored my admonishments, Mr. Katie made his own “Skat” noise. The racoon seemed to believe that he was a bigger threat and quickly retreated back into the grass.
It wasn’t gone for long though, a minute later, it happened again. For a few minutes, the cycle would repeat itself. We would think the racoon was gone and we would turn back to the fire only see another racoon when we moved our flashlights back to the bacon drop zone. It didn’t take us long to realize that there was more than one racoon playing with us. Once when I turned my flashlight I saw two racoons, one on top of another. It would have been too cute for words had it not been happening on my campsite, near my family. As it got darker, I could see their raccoon eyes glow in my flashlight and I noticed that there were at least four sets of eyes, all of whom behaved like they weren’t afraid.
I was starting to feel like we were under siege. I worried for the safety of our little boys who were asleep inside of the camper less than five feet from where all the action was happening. I was beginning to feel like Mr. Katie and I were playing one big game of Whac-A-Mole with the raccoons. We would shine the flashlight, see them, make a noise, and they would retreat for a very short time. . .over and over again. I can’t over estimate how stressful it felt at the time. Something had to be done.
Luckily, nature provided a solution. Around this time Mr. Katie realized it was about the time he visited the restroom. He decided that he was going to urinate near the bacon spill spot, near the camper, and see what would happen. I looked away. Then I too decided that it couldn’t hurt to mark our territory a little. I was nervous even going near the raccoon area, but I was fine in the end.
Guess what? Marking our territory completely worked. We didn’t see the raccoons again that night at all. Pretty soon the raccoons where distant memory of a funny little incident that happened that evening.
After I got home and I was preparing to write about this showdown, I Googled “using urine to keep raccoons away” and it turns out this is a common practice. Apparently, mountain lion, coyote, or wolf urine work best and can be purchased online or those in need can just use their own for free.
As for bears, Mr. Katie thinks he saw eyes at the correct level in the woods while he was walking to the bathroom before the raccoon incident . . . but it seems like raccoons were the animals we should have really been warned about all along.
Sounds like quite an exciting camping trip!
It was an exciting trip. Thanks for reading!
Google tells me that the collective noun for raccoons is a gaze. Pretty cool.
I wonder what is a scarier thought: One black bear sniffing around the campsite, or a gaze of five raccoons? I think maybe the raccoons.
Bears near your camper are scary too. The night is dark and full of terrors. Now put that in your pipe and smoke it!