May 11-12, 2024
Site 96 (not a large grass area and super muddy. The firepit and table were super close to the wooded area as well.)
Our first camping trip of the season! While, yes, this was the “first,” it was more of a quick shakedown to see what we needed to fix before some of our bigger adventures this summer.
We started off by sleeping in Saturday morning at home and leisurely getting ourselves ready. It was quite rainy, and while we are fully capable of camping in the rain, it does subdue the experience a bit. Nevertheless, we were excited to finally hit the road after all the upgrades and effort we’ve put into the van this past winter.
We left around 2:00pm and drove to Keystone State Park. Along the way, we stopped at a little garage antique shop called Denny’s Antiques. He had quite the selection, but we left empty handed.
We visited the very closed visitor’s center and drove around the small lake before making our way to our campsite. It was pretty lackluster, to be honest. The pictures when we made the reservation looked much more promising, but we made it work. Since it was so rainy, we didn’t use much of the minimal grassy space, firepit or picnic table.
Once settled, we enjoyed the rain by literally doing nothing and just relaxing in the van. I read some of my book, Jeff played on his radio and phone, and then we both took a 2 hour nap! We were absolutely exhausted. The past few months renovating the van and it taking longer than expected were quite frustrating and tiring. Jeff has spent every single evening working on some portion of the van, so for it to be in a place where we could actually take it somewhere was liberating by also a huge sigh of relief. The ability to rest felt so good.
On Sunday morning, we slept in before getting ourselves ready. The night had been quite chilly, and we both woke up a few times. We had decided to keep the pop top down to try and preserve our heat, which was a great decision. The showers were hot and had great pressure which was amazing on such a chilly morning, and I thoroughly enjoyed my coffee. We also enjoyed Life cereal before heading out for the day.
Jeff and I decided we wanted to explore the state park, but we were a bit underwhelmed. The lakeside campsites were much nicer than the hillside campsite we had stayed at, and the small lake was nice, but there was very little to actually do in the area. We drove around for a bit, and then Charlotte stalled out at a stop sign and completely turned off. It was so weird. We decided that we needed to investigate this issue further before we continued traveling for fear of needing towed home, so we made the journey back home for Mother’s Day.
While short, this shakedown was very…successful. We quickly found many things that needed to be addressed before the next camping trip. As I said, we had a couple instances where Charlotte just…stopped. Or wouldn’t turn on. Jeff believes it was the fuel filter, so hopefully that will resolve once we replace that. We also learned right before the trip that Charlotte needed new front shocks and some updates to her steering, which we temporarily fixed for this trip, but we will need to permanently make changes too. We also determined that our battery display needed to be upgraded to actually see how much power our solar panels were taking in and how much battery we had left. We had a few mystery noises in the dash from dangling wires that were never secured along with a few other minor tweaks we realized needed some attention. Lastly, we discovered that I had forgotten to pack taco seasoning, so we made do with our tiny multi-seasoning kit with HORRIBLE openings- Jeff ended up taking his knife and tearing apart the openings to the seasonings to actually get anything out. We ended up seasoning our tacos with everything in the wheel, including curry, paprika, cayenne, garlic powder, salt, and pepper. They actually turned out surprisingly well, but I will definitely be buying some actual spices devoted to the van.
Some luxuries we did enjoy included our new fridge and having cold (but not wet or floating!) food! It was so nice to be able to store leftovers, have ice-cold milk for our cereal, and make ice (even if we did realize our freezer needed to be turned down even more).
We’re super excited to continue making improvements as we travel this summer!
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