hot dogs and orange juice

Shelley left for Texas on Friday after a week long visit to Arizona. During her visit, I made good use of her mad decorating skills, we spent a lot of time at the DeKok's pool (always wearing SPF 45 of course, Papa), saw a rather humorous production of "The King and I" at a theatre across town, and took a girls only camping trip to Sedona - a trip that we will one day look back on as being fun. Just kidding. It was fun, but not without glitches. We were so proud of ourselves for going camping - just the two of us girls. We had it all planned out. Got the grub, and I don't mean sandwiches. We were going to eat well on our camping trip. We bought beef tenderloin, and I sliced zuchini that we planned to grill.

We got up Sunday morning and drove to Sedona heading straight to this beautiful 4 hour hike, and did the whole thing. By the end, we were ravenous enough that we were practically running to the car. We could hardly wait to get to camp, set up the tent, and eat a gourmet camp dinner of beef tenderloin and grilled zuchini. Well...we found the camp site just fine, and then things took a turn for the worse. The Camp host informed us that there was a burn ban - no problem (especially since we forgot the matches). We looked at each other with confident snickers, knowing we had conquered the burn ban problem with our electric griddle and nifty converter. Oh, and our camp site was right next to the camp hosts' who sat and wathed our every move.

This fact made it much more difficult as we tried oh so hard to be inconspicuous with the huge electric griddle and regular-sized 10-cup coffee pot, not wanting to give the impression that we were not "roughing it." Shelley handed me the griddle, got the extension cord, and as I plugged it into the converter, I head a beep and then a very small pop - the converter short circuiting I guess. Now we didn't have a heat source and there would be no coffee in the morning. Thankfully (I guess) we took along some hotdogs (no buns, but we did have some french bread). We each had a cold hotdog on french bread with lots of mustard, and orange juice that was supposed to be enjoyed with the eggs, bacon, sausage, and biscuits that we both looked forward to so much, reminiscing about camp breakfast on Sheets family camping trips. Here is a picture of all of the things we took on our camping trip and didn't get to use.

I guess this gives away the fact that we planned to watch DVDs on our camping trip. Oh, and we were too embarrassed to drag the laptop (for watching the DVDs), the coffee pot, and the griddle out onto the picnic table for the photo shoot. Too obvious. Notice there are no matches on the table. One thing we could have used that we didn't remember to take: flashlight. Who goes camping and remembers the coffee pot but forgets the flashlight and matches for goodness sake?

Thankfully, having no way to cook our food gave us an excuse to go into town: we needed ice to preserve our food. On the way in to town, we noticed an ice cream shop. After suffering through cold hot dogs for dinner (cold hot dogs are so much worse than hot ones by the way...SO much worse), we decided we deserved ice cream. We ordered a double dip on a waffle cone to share, and a DECAF coffee, which I'm pretty sure was mistakenly made regular based on the hours it took us both to go to sleep! Best ice cream we've ever had...hands down. It was homemade. One scoop of malted vanilla, and one scoop of gingersnap (homemade vanilla with cinnamon swirls and crushed ginger snaps). We'll have to go back some day to see if it's really the best ice cream ever or if we were just hungry for something besides cold hotdogs and OJ.

Actually (that's for you, Kara), we did have a wonderful time, and are sure that the men in our lives (Nate, Papa and the brothers) would be proud of the two of us for attempting to rough it, even if we did forget the matches and try to cheat a little. It ended up being a fun trip and no doubt a lasting memory. We are both thankful to our Papa for teaching us to be creative and to turn challenges into fun memories!

This is Shaggs enjoying some good cold hot dog and OJ. You can tell she loved it! The above photo was taken at a coffee shop where we stopped in for our much needed morning cup of coffee (or cream if if you're Shelley).