Adventures in Camping
I took a long weekend and drove down to Princeton, New Jersey to attend David and Sharon's wedding. I didn't stay in the Princeton area, instead I decided to camp at Cheesequake State Park over in Matawan, about a 40 minute drive northeast of Princeton. This plan would have worked out well expect for the fact that it decided to rain. Some of you long time readers may remember my last camping adventure and have similar bad flashbacks. One vital piece has changed since last time and that is the fact that I bought a new tent.
A former coworker pointed me at Nikwax as a possible way to restore my old tent. The lack of water proof wasn't the only issue that my old tent had. It also had a couple of patched holes in the floor and the frame poll elastics were shot, not to mention prone to leaving a metallic residue on your hands. Needless to say the tent didn't owe me anything else. A random trip to REI brought me in touch with the Lighting from Sierra Designs. A similar profile free standing two person tent. After this weekend I can safely say that 1) this tent is water proof and 2) it was a great buy. I love the added breathability of the tent and the under cover but outside the tent protected area by the door made a great place for storing my boots (helping keep the sand and muck outside the tent). I got the optional ground mat which I only suspect helped with the overall water withstanding that the tent did.
Now I did say that I was also going down for a wedding. I especially chose Cheesequake since it had shower facilities. I didn't think anyone would really like me showing up to the wedding a day of grime and wearing the clothes I had slept in :) I can only imagine that I surprised the couple that was standing outside of the showers when I walked out in a full suit and tie. I was in a hurry at the time so I didn't get a chance to chat with them but I could see some confusion registered on their faces.
Since it was raining almost the entire time I was at the state park I didn't explore as much as I had hoped. They do have an extensive set of nature trails with many interruptive signs and some great views. The walk I did go on was primarily around the Hook's Lake area. They have a couple of osprey nesting posts in a part of the area. Unfortunately the nests are set way back and you would really need a set of binoculars to see anything. The zoom on my camera didn't help at all. Being that it was very humid and drizzly during my walk the bugs were also out in full force. I managed to avoid most of them by being covered up in rain gear and having thrown on some Ben's. Alas, a couple still found bare spots and I ended up with a couple of now very itchy bites.
The wedding was in the Princeton Chapel. I think this is something of a misnomer as it is more like a cathedral. I'm sure if I went digging I could find out exactly why it's called that but frankly I'm not that curious about it. The stained glass in the building is a beautiful blue and very hard to take pictures of. About the only pictures I have that turned out well were some shots of the outside of the church. This is the second indoor wedding I've gone to in which I've had almost no luck getting any pictures. I'm sure there are some settings I could tweak on my camera to get better shots. In any case a couple of them didn't turn out that bad.
And since this post is kind of rambling all over the place, instead of being broken up into three posts, I'll just stick in a complain about traffic around NYC. AFAIK no navigation system is supporting real time traffic rerouting for the northeast, because I sure would love to have one of those systems. All told I think I spent about two hours crawling along at about 10 MPH around NYC. Some of that may have been avoided if I didn't just plug my final address into my GPS. One humorous piece was at some point a Peter Pan bus tried to merge into the tractor trailer that was in front of me. The truck lost part of its front left wheel cover. Now keep it mind that this all happened at about 8 MPH.
Killing time between the ceremony and the reception I headed out with David's cousins to an ice cream shop near Princeton called the Halo Pub. Very yummy stuff. I also learned some Princeton lore while eating the ice cream since one of his cousins had gone to graduate school there. The best bit was that it is bad luck for a freshman to walk through the main gate.
Oh yeah, I have some pictures from the weekend.