CAMPING part 1: omg pancakes

I finally have something entertaining to blog about, so I will be as descriptive as possible for your reading pleasure. So my school friends and I went camping last weekend to Pawtuckaway, New Hampshire. The forecast had predicted rain the entire weekend but the weather was actually pretty nice most of the time. It was an epic adventure filled with action, thrills, laughter, natural beauty, and caterpillars.

It was Friday and I had just returned from practicing dance at Mamtha's. I was leisurely packing my camping things, happy that the weather was clearing up when Nipunn and Dennis showed up at my house 45 minutes ahead of schedule. After cramming the rest of my things into Dennis' minivan, we picked up three bags of ice from a gas station and Katherine from her house. We set the campsite destination into the GPS and set off. It was a great long ride to Pawtuckaway thanks to the Friday afternoon traffic.


We were all quite excited we entered the campgrounds (we also had to go to the bathroom after downing large cans of Iced Tea). But oh no! Turns out the GPS had led us into the middle of some random trails rather than the campgrounds. While Dennis took a driving break to relieve himself in the bushes, Nipunn hijacked the van and started driving away.


And then we decided to roll back and pick up Dennis, since the campsite was registered in his name. After driving around to find some signal, we called some friends and got directions to the campsite. Another 45 minutes later, we made it to Pawtuckaway and bumped into Staci, Jeff, Cat, and Jesse who invaded the van and got us to our site. And we finally met up with Alex, Kim, and Kevin. The next few hours were spent assorting our belongings into various tents and locating chairs and flashlights. At about 8, we tried to start a campfire.


Several paper bags and a bottle of lighter fluid later, it was 9:30 and we decided that we were starving and it would be a good idea to ask someone for help. A nice man from a neighboring site used the Boston Herald to light us a fire and we finally got it going. It was 10 when we finally got the food grilling. After eating and horsing around, we decided we should go to bed before too many insects came out and started harassing us.

After about 3 hours of sleep, I woke up at 5 AM along with Staci and Nipunn. We brushed our teeth and took a nice walk through the woods. It was a perfect day. We were told that we couldn't start cooking breakfast until everyone was awake, so we devoured the last brownie crumbs from the day before and lounged around in the middle campsite as people trickled out of their tents. It was 9 AM when the hunger was too much and we pulled out a bottle of Bisquick Shake n' Pour to make pancakes on a skillet. We didn't want to try making a campfire, so we lit a bag of coals. Then, we realized that we didn't have any grease for the skillet! We searched. The closest thing we found to butter was one of those stovetop popcorn things. Dennis decided that he would try to cook the pancakes anyway, without any butter. He proceeded to make a pathetic looking blob of dough that ended up more like a cracker than a pancake.


However, it didn't taste bad, so we used up the entire bottle of Shake n' Pour.


The last came out pretty well and tasted almost like a pancake though it looked more like a Cannoli.


Despite having successfully used the entire bottle of portable pancake mix, we were still hungry. We only then found out that 1 bottle of Shake n' Pour cannot feed 12 people. We devoured whatever snacks we could find before setting out on a trip up the hiking trails to FIRE TOWER! Dun dun dunnnnnn.

To be continued...

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