When we arrived in New England in the summer of 2009 we immediately learned that one cannot go camping on the spur of the moment, at least during the main season. All of the public campgrounds and many of the private ones accept reservations six months in advance and if you don't book well in advance you're out of luck.
Six months ago our neighbors Molly and Brendan invited us to join them for a camping trip in August. We chose Lake Dennison. We were supposed to camp there with other neighbors in 2013 but something came up and we couldn't make it.
As this particular trip approached, the weather wasn't looking promising. Early in the preceding week, it looked like it would rain all weekend. But the forecast slowly improved as the week went one, and by Friday it looked like it could be OK, with just a few showers. We decided to go for it. Brendan and Molly were wavering but they were infected by our resolve.
Friday as we were packing it was one of those really gross New England summer days with high temps and very high humidity. I left work a little early and took the train home, and after just the 7-minute walk from the train station to home I was soaked in sweat. Ick. Meanwhile, the cold front that was bringing the worst of the rain was passing slowly over the campground about 60 miles west of us.
When we arrived at Lake Dennison, the campground was wet but it wasn't raining. We immediately set up lots of shelter. We have a canopy that we always bring, and I had borrowed a very large tarp from a neighbor to give us more dry area in case it rained a lot.
We were prepared.
Well, the weekend turned out to be fantastic.
The weather on the other side of the front was much more pleasant - warm but not too hot, and much less humid. And it didn't rain again during our entire visit.
There is a public swimming beach on the opposite side of the lake from our camp site. I paddled there in the canoe with Brendan and Molly and Anna, and Carol and the girls rode bikes there. We hung out at the beach for a few hours. The lake temperature was perfect.
We enjoyed our campfires and the girls played and played.
The rain arrived just as we were finishing packing on Sunday morning. It was still pleasantly warm out, so the girls and I went for a swim in the rain before we departed. It was a perfect ending.
2 comments:
John, Seattle is rapidly approaching east coast levels of crowding in popular campgrounds. If you want to camp in Deception Pass or on Mount Rainier you've got to reserve in February for summer weekends. Now, there's still lots of "go find a flat spot near a river in national forest" sorts of camping sites that I assume you can't find in the Boston Area....
Ya, no such thing here like those no-frills National Forest campgrounds like on the Mountain Loop Highway. And there are a lot more private campgrounds. We stay in those fairly often but always feel like outsiders because they are typically filled with "seasonals" - people who don't want to pay for gas to drive their RV around so they park it in one spot all season and use it like a cabin. They even build permanent porches and stuff!
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