I had some more photos I wanted to share with you in the post yesterday from our recent camping trip to the "thumb" of Michigan, but I felt it was getting a little to long. Instead, I'm going to share them with you today. If you missed the post yesterday, you can check it out here.
The last night of our trip we decided to have fajitas. I've really come to love the small 22" Blackstone griddle that we bought last year. It is quite versatile and if we wanted to we could probably cook most every meal on it. We don't though.
I still like that special something that grilling over a charcoal gives you, so we still bring our little Weber grill with us when we travel. I'm also interested in picking up one of those grates that swings over the firepit sometime so I can start perfecting my technique at open fire cooking.
We also need to try and get a little more use out of the cast iron dutch oven we bought several years ago. I feel like we only bust it out about once a year and that is truly a shame.
Breakfast is pretty much a given on the Blackstone. It just handles that really well. The biggest issue I have is the fact that it is never quite level. That means @mrsbozz's scramble eggs go all over the place before I can wrangle them together into something cohesive.
It's actually pretty funny these days, you see a Blackstone sitting at pretty much every campsite when you walk around the campground. Some people leave theirs out all the time. Personally, I pull mine in the trailer each night because I don't want someone walking off with it. No small feat since it's a rolled steel cook top and it weighs about 50 pounds. It's just awkward to move in and out, but I manage.
What I really like is the fact that I can hook it up to the propane on the trailer so I don't have to worry about juggling dozens of those little gas canisters that you see around.
After visiting the beach on our walk, which again you can see in my post yesterday, we decided to take a bit more of a stroll through the other half of the park. Sleeper State Park in Caseville is split up into two different sections. There is an east loop and a west loop. We were camping in the west loop, so we took a quick hike through the east loop.
The photo above falls into the camping etiquette category that I mentioned in the preview to this post. Can you see that white truck on the right hand side of the road in the photo above? Notice how close the front of the truck is to the road? It's actually sitting a couple of inches over the road when you get right up close to it.
That's an accident waiting to happen. If I remember correctly, my trailer is something like 9 feet wide. This single lane road through the campground isn't much wider than that. When people don't pay attention to how they are parking, it's just asking for your fancy new truck or trailer to get damaged.
I think this is one of those cases where people are so self absorbed in their own world that they don't realize what they do impacts others. I've been to several campgrounds where tow vehicles and trailers have been clipped causing major damage from people parking like idiots.
In addition to not parking like a dick, another piece of camping etiquette I'd like to share with you applies to campsites. I was sitting under our awning on Sunday afternoon and I can't tell you the number of people who walked through our site to get to the bathhouse that was right across the street.
There are designated paths all over the place connecting the different roads in each loop, but people think the rules don't apply to them and instead of being courteous, they choose the easy route and cut through occupied camping sites.
There was a point that @mrsbozz actually yelled at some of them. It makes me think of the post @ericvancewalton just made the other day about staying off people's lawns. While the state parks do technically belong to all of us, when you are camping, you are renting that little slice of land and by default it becomes your space.
When I was camping as a kid, I never would have thought it was okay to walk through someone else's site. These days, people do it right in front of you and when you say something or give them a look they act like you are the one who is out of line.
It's crazy!
The last piece of etiquette has to do with quiet hours, but honestly, I can't give you much help on that one. They usually start around 10 PM in most parks, but there have been several occasions that the park rangers have found their way to our site asking us to quiet down. I'm usually the one trying to keep the rest of our group in order (big surprise), but sometimes I get a little loud too.
Oddly enough, ever since Covid happened, the number of workers at many of the parks has steeply declined. Additionally, people (even those who are supposed to be in authority) shy away from confrontation these days, so it's pretty rare we see workers driving around policing the grounds like we used to.
In fact, at some State Parks they don't even have staff available to check you in anymore. When you get there you pick up a yellow phone and you contact some call center elsewhere in the state to check in.
It was raining when we pulled into home on Monday morning. Due to that fact, one of the lines was hanging a little lower than usual. I clipped it with the trailer and ended up bringing it down. YOu can see them if you look really closely in the photo above.
I knew the three lines were old phone lines, so I moved them out of the way which was probably dumb in hindsight. Even though I knew they were low voltage, they still could have been touching something that wasn't.
I called the non emergency phone number for the county and after the fire department came out to check the lines and make sure they weren't dangerous, I had them cut them. As I expected, neither us or our neighbors suffered any lack of service.
Who knows how long it will take the company to come out and remediate the wires given the fact that no one was actually using them in the first place. I was kind of an annoying end to what was otherwise a really great trip.
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