Camping With Strangers (long) (729 hits)
Category: GeneralRating: 1.14 on 12 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by <ejryuu.at.gmail.com> (View user info) at 2005-10-05 15:22:43 EDT
Background:
A friend of mine that I've only known online for half a decade, Sinien, calls me on the day he gets back from his three month trip in Europe. We talk about vacations and when I should take one. Instead of me flying from my home in Minnesota down to his neck of the woods in Florida, I decide to fly him up for a week. Reasons being that (1) Sinien's dirt-fucking poor now, (2) he's below the legal drinking age, (3) my girlfriend also wants to meet him and (4) I'm lazy.
-Wednesday-
My girlfriend and I wait at the airport after work to pick up numb nuts. I've only seen one picture of this guy and it was from over four years ago when he was pedophile bait at age nineteen. I wonder if we'll get along...What if he's a complete bag of dirty nutsacks? Just because you can yack with someone online doesn't mean that much. Sinien's plane is delayed and I haven't had anything to eat for the past ten hours. The only reason I'm not stealing the nearest infant and chowing down is the fact that there are so many hot women at the airport. Maybe one of them will have a ride abandon them and we'll have to take home a stray. My bed's big enough for two or three...and me. And there's a monk here too! Nearly-shaved head (he's got that "ring 'o hair" deal) and brown robe with the rope sash and everything. I wonder if he knows the five point palm exploding heart technique. Every thirty seconds, I piss off the old lady (and thus sustain my hunger by thriving on pissing her off) by yelling "Is that him?!" and making her look in every direction. I feel no guilt. Finally, a lanky six and a half foot kid walks down the stairs, glances at Christina and I and whips me the finger. Nice to meet you, Sinien. We jet back to our place, make the usual small talk and then everyone goes to sleep. I still couldn't believe that on the spur of the moment, I was hanging out with this guy I'd never met. We'd tried many times prior to this to get together but the carefully laid-out plans always fell through. Funny that this time took one week from conception to the plane landing.
-Thursday-
My girlfriend and I both go to work because I'm not taking more than a day or two off of work while he's here for the week. Tonight's supposed to be our usual "Thirsty Thursday" where a bunch of people come over to my house to drink and play Halo 2. It's a step up from fucking farm animals, isn't it? But there's a long wait before we can start drinking. Too much other stuff to do. For one, we have to get camping supplies. Just a few minor things like a tent, food, flashlight, bug spray....we pretty much needed everything except sleeping bags. And we're going on Friday. We were supposed to get a site for the whole weekend, but I was informed while making the reservations (read: Wednesday) that all of the reserved sites were already booked. Who in the fuck goes camping at the very end of August? At any rate, the deal was that we could get a site for Friday. This particular campground keeps half of their sites open for walk-ins, but I was warned that they fill up fast so it's a first come, first served deal. And they open at nine in the morning. To recap, if we want a spot for Saturday, we have to crawl our asses into my car at seven in the morning on Friday after heavy drinking Thursday night, drive two hours north and HOPE that they'll have room for us. Sure....
After picking up camping supplies, we head back to my place. My girlfriend's called me several times to let me know she's still out with co-workers drinking. Heavily. Other people aren't going to show up for at least three more hours so she's getting a little bit of a head start. Sinien hears this and starts following suit, monopolizing a cheap bottle of Bacardi Silver with a hint of coke. I mean the otherwise clear alcohol was barely tinted brown. By the time the rest of my white posse shows up, my internet friend and my sex partner are pretty much in the bag. In a futile effort to keep up, I start mixing Jag bombs for myself. Fast forward to a few hours later and you'll find Sinien wrapped around my toilet with regurgitated Arby's roast beef scattered everywhere, everyone else leaving or in the process of leaving and me clutching the bed, striving to maintain my lifetime achievement of not throwing up after drinking. I'm proud to say the streak continues.
-Friday-
My eyes slowly peel open at about the same time the camping office turns their sign to the "open" side. Oops. My girlfriend wakes up and offers to make breakfast. No one's really in the mood to eat. I shower quickly and wake up Sinien. Half an hour later, we're on the road and in desperate need of hydration. I'm thirsty. Sinien's thirsty. My car, however, is not thirsty. It rained like a motherfucker overnight and yours truly sort of forgot to roll up his driver's side window. My khakis look like I pissed myself out the back end. A one liter bottle of water was worth more to me than a threesome with Tony Danza and McGuyver. I turn up Audioslave on the stereo in an attempt to wake up. Sinien requests that I keep the music at a very, very low volume. I comply. The less vomiting that goes on in my Neon, the better. We make a few more stops on the way up before we're completely out of civilization for some snacks, rubbers and more alcohol. God forbid you start drinking and feeding some furry butch lumberjack woman some little debbies without a raincoat, right?
Sinien and I arrive at Jay Cook State Park in the early afternoon. My pants are now damp and I'm pretty positive that there's mold starting to grow. We step out of the car and make our way to the office. The heavens yawn and a steady drizzle begins. There's no problem booking Saturday night. Maybe the rain scared off would-be campers. So we'll take whatever for two nights.
We stumble our way to our rain-saturated site and find our first real challenge - putting up a tent. We're almost out of water and still moving very slowly. The tent erection goes something like this: Put in a fiberglass pole, sit, drink, rest. Put in another fiberglass pole, sit, drink, rest. Entire countries have gotten up and running in less time than it took the two of us to set up this thing. By the time we finished, though, the rain had stopped and the sun decided to come out in full force. Wonderful. The only food we brought was deli ham, cheese, Doritos and bread. As we sat back on our still-damp picnic table, admiring this tent that took us well over an hour to put up, Sinien grabs a handful of ham and shoves it in his mouth. Chomping away, he mumbles "Dude! You've got to try this. It tastes so good!" My stomach readily agreed as I devoured the swine. Heaven is fresh ham in the woods with your friend after winning the battle against the tent.
Then it happened.
The killer bee from hell.
Actually, it was just a regular bee. But it made Sinien scream like a little girl, jump off the table and start flailing. It was clear that this bee's sole purpose of being was to ruin our shit. I took a piece of cardboard that came with the tent and valiantly took swing after swing. I'm pretty sure I pissed it off. The bee gave up after awhile and we rested. Time to go on a nature walk!
This particular campground has a heavily fortified wooden bridge that crosses over some miniature rapids and into hiking trails. The bridge itself squeaks, or rather makes a very heavy squeaking noise when you jump on it. The bridge doesn't actually move as it's reinforced by a metric fuckton of steel, iron and chewing gum, but rest assured that the noise is very, very annoying. Consequently, we picked a spot on some rocks near the bridge to yack about life, love and the idiots crossing the bridge that felt the need to jump. One particular nasty-looking fellow was crossing the bridge with his family, including a very young daughter. So this yutz gets to the middle of the bridge, lifts up his daughter and proceeds to hold her out OVER the bridge all Michael Jackson style. She's screaming. I had to literally slam my hands over my mouth to avoid screaming "JUST FUCKING DO IT!" We left our spot on the rocks shortly thereafter to get more meat-cheese-Doritos sandwiches.
The only recreational item we brought (condoms don't really count...) was a frisbee. You can't just lie around and let bees attack you for two days. So we played frisbee. One connection Sinien and I made quickly was our absolute unbridled loathing of children. We'd see a kid riding a bike on a trail, laughing their loud, unmasculine laughs and realize that both of us were chanting "fall, fall, fall" under our breath. At one point, we were very near finding a stick to throw in the next child biker's spokes. Anyway, back to the frisbee. It didn't take long to realize that with the amount of children walking/biking/crawling in our way and the erratic patterns of frisbee throwing that we could gun for children with our purple plastic disc of doom and "get away" with it. Oh I'm sorry, mom and dad, but your kid was in the way and the wind took the frisbee. Look, he'll come out of that concussion. Tell the little shit to skate it off. It got pretty brutal. Or at least the attempts did. We couldn't stop laughing when a runt crossed our path. You'd see the other guy's eyes just shift and go into lock-on mode. But the problem is that they'd move so fast and in an unorthodox pattern that we never actually did hit any. Extremely close on some throws, but there was no blood or crying or falling down.
Late afternoon passed with more frisbee mauling attempts and nature walks. The sun was setting and it wasn't until about this time that the effects of the booze from the previous day began to wear off. I've never felt that shitty for that long. As we sat by our fresh campfire, we figured it was time to start drinking again. The bottles of Heineken were still warm...and lacking a twist-off top. We lack a bottle opener...this is a major problem. Sinien knew some tricks as to how to get it open but all of them failed. Our table edges were too rounded and still moist to just pop the top off. We didn't have a lighter. The "store" at the office didn't have any bottle openers either. In short, we were fucked. We gave up on our beer dreams after many failed attempts that resulted in bleeding knuckles. Sinien's last notable attempt was to just break open half of the bottle over the table via smashing it and pouring the rest into a cup. I declined that one.
What camping trip of mine would be complete without a visit to the local titty bar? That's right boys and girls; we're headed for the infamous Sugar Daddy's. A diamond in the rough, this place was classier than a lot of strip clubs you'd find in cities where the population of people is greater than that of livestock. We walk in, I pay the cover to the extremely cute bartender chick and we have a seat near the stage. There were no less than seven different girls on stage that night and it didn't take us long to put them on our "I'd go to prison for that" and "I wouldn't fuck that with your dick" lists. There was only one that made the latter list. It wasn't so much her body as it was the music she danced to. You can -not- strip to country music. Feel free to argue with me here, but it's just a bad idea. Stripping to country music was the one sign that brought us back to the reality that we were in the sticks at a titty bar. Well that and the flannel-clad patrons...I'd rather talk to the guy next to me than watch the bulbous chick with boobs that were too big lumber around and shake her stuff. Forgive me, that's the country music talking. Had she danced to ACDC's "Whole Lotta Rosie," I probably would've busted three nuts. Don't even ask me how it's possible; just know that I would've. Sinien picks out his favorite girl and being the fantastic friend that I am take care of his lap dance fee and then some. Before the two of them left to the VIP room, I whispered to the stripper that this was his bachelor party and to do whatever she could. Maybe I should've warned Sinien to just go along with whatever she said but by that time it was too late. It was still good, I guess, but a little bit awkward when she asked him when he was getting married...shortly after Sinien and his new friend finished their alone time together, she prepared to get on stage for the second time. Before we left, though, we wanted to see a chick dance to Rage Against the Machine. Just...because. I approached the scantily clad young lady and asked her if she'd grant the request. She regretted to inform me that for her next routine, she'd already picked her set of three songs (The White Stripes) but that the next time she went up, she'd do it. Because she was amazingly hot and we wanted to hear some Rage, Sinien and I waited through the lengthy dances of all of the other girls with daddy issues. An hour and a half later, she was back on. We were literally counting down the number of songs until she came on. Sweaty with anticipation, I wait for some Bulls on Parade or Testify or Killing in the Name. What aurally rapes me? None other than Cake's "Never There"
...
...
...
I throw down a handful of one dollar bills. In stripper language, that means "come here." I politely told her that this was NOT Rage Against the Machine. "Oh, I forgot," she says. That's not good enough. I'm seething on the inside but trying to play it cool on the outside. I just wasted an hour and a half of my life, by this time completely desensitized to the female body JUST for this one girl to dance her three songs and I get fucking Cake. As she walks away, I yell to her, "I can't beat off to Cake!" - that became a catch phrase for the rest of the trip. Sinien and I got back into my car feeling quite dejected. Out of all the things a stripper gets asked to do, she can't pick the right songs. I want all of my dirty money back.
-Saturday-
Every fourth phrase that comes out of our mouths is either "I love strippers" or "I can't beat off to Cake." Doritos, orange juice and bees for breakfast. Most of the day is spent frisbee sniping, bridge watching and trying to figure out how we can get to the large cluster of rocks in the middle of this river without swimming. I manage to get ahold of my girlfriend right before my phone dies and let her know to come up to us. We're starting to get bored.
We managed to pick up a lighter from a gas station before we went to the strip club. It took Sinien all of five minutes to destroy it trying to get those bottles of beer open again. He must've loosened up the clamped top enough that he was able to pry it open. I tried with my beer and between that and slamming it on the drier picnic table, my beer opened shortly thereafter. I've never had to work so hard for a brew. A resounding "YES!!!" echoed throughout the campground as we chugged our victories.
After what seems like an eternity, Christina shows up. I make a run up to civilization to get more food from the local Wal-Mart. I've discovered that when all a town has is a Wal-Mart, the ratio of people that are reasonable to look at compared to ugly ones is surprisingly better than you'd think! We cook hot dogs and finish off the rest of our Wonderbread. Shortly thereafter, light strikes my brain and I've got a brand new game to play: Martyr. The idea of the game is quite simple: One person stands in front of a tree about ten feet away from the picnic table, arms and legs out spread eagle, unable to move. This person is the martyr. The other participant sits on the picnic table and picks up three reasonably small stones...then proceeds to throw them at the other person. If the martyr moves, the stoner gets an extra throw. After you've thrown your three stones, you switch places. Christina and I played this with each other for hours. Did I mention we were drinking?
It's getting dark, the fire's roaring and Sinien decides it's too cold to sleep here again. I could survive it, but I thought the ground was rock hard.
"Well we could just pack up all the stuff and go home, E.J."
"Hmmmm, maybe. And we could still make it in time for that party in Minneapolis."
"Dude let's just go! We'll take out the stakes in the tent, shove it in the car trunk and throw all the other shit in the back."
Ten minutes later, Christina and Sinien are in her car and I'm a bit buzzed from Captain Morgan's Parrot Bay Mango Rum and orange juice flying solo. It's completely dark the entire way home. Over two surprisingly fast hours later, I'm back at home, taking a shower getting ready to pick up more people and make a brief appearance at a friend's going away party. By the time we arrived, the party was dying down so it was more or less a "hi, bye" kind of deal. We found ourselves back at my place, drinking and playing Halo 2 until the sun came up. Tough to believe that twenty-four hours ago, I was camping with a guy I'd never met, staring at naked girls. Man, I love strippers.
User Reviews
Submitted by Brdn_Nkd (user info) at 2007-11-20 15:54:08 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
Submitted by AwesomeJohnson (user info) at 2005-10-05 15:46:07 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Beating off into Cake is just wrong.
Submitted by scourge (user info) at 2005-11-18 18:10:10 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Here you go Captain Morgan.
Submitted by ozzy (user info) at 2005-10-06 07:02:02 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Yes you warned us it was long, but it was unnecessarily long. You could have chopped 75% out of this story and still have it make sense.
Submitted by Pentameter (user info) at 2005-10-06 06:38:45 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
You should have punched that bee in the face.
Submitted by Smack_Fuck (user info) at 2005-10-05 16:17:03 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
Not long enough.
Submitted by AwesomeJohnson (user info) at 2005-10-05 15:46:07 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Beating off into Cake is just wrong.
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2005-10-05 15:45:51 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
good story.
Submitted by cuberat (user info) at 2005-10-05 15:40:45 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Normally this would get a -2, but "I can't beat off to Cake" saved it from being a total waste.
Submitted by WildcatMcGee (user info) at 2005-10-05 15:37:32 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I have to say, this was rather long a quite boring. BUT! I can't beat off to Cake either.
Submitted by MrWillard (user info) at 2005-10-05 15:33:55 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
My bad
Submitted by MrWillard (user info) at 2005-10-05 15:33:35 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
Whoops
Submitted by MrWillard (user info) at 2005-10-05 15:33:17 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Needs more fucking