So, who needs civilization?

By the time you read this I will already be gone.  (Unless, of course, I decide to post this tonight.  Then I will be sleep.  But TOMORROW I will be gone... If you read this then... anyway!)  This weekend I am going on a fellas camping trip to the Smoky Mountains.  My wife is from Colorado so she laughs any time I call them the Smoky Mountains.  She acts like I'm trying to prove something by calling them mountains.  That's what they are.  That's their name.  Even if you are a small mountain, you are a mountain nonetheless.

So I will be going camping for a few days.  I will be away from everything.  No computer.  No phone.  No internet.  No TV.  (I guess I could just say I will be away from anything that requires electricity to run.)  It's going to be interesting since it's the same campsite we used to go to when we were in high school.  That normally wouldn't be a concern.  But we were a LOT younger then.  So the idea of 50 - 75lbs backpacks and a 4-mile hike down a mountain doesn't sound as fun as it did back in the day.

If you had asked me in high school what I thought about making this trip this many years later I probably would have told you that by then I would be so rich I would hire someone to carry my pack for me down the mountain.  Well, that didn't happen.  I'm just rich enough to hire someone to get the bags out of the car and that's about it. (But I'm just poor enough that I will do that myself.)

Another sign that I'm getting old is that my pre-trip mindset was completely different when I was younger.  Back then I was thinking of a lot of things I wanted to do that would make a great story.  Thinking about it now, I'm really just hoping to get out of the camping trip without ANY major stories to tell.  The last time we made this trip we were cautioned of bear sitings at our campsite (but we went anyway), we almost lost a friend (because we hiked at night (not too bright (pun intended))), we couldn't find the site (again... night hike down a mountain), we slept ON the trail the first night (did I mention it was night), we almost lost half of our food (night hike with a cooler of food tied to a thick stick carried by two people (man we were idiots), and we had one of us completely navigate 25ft of the trail in pitch dark while sleep walking (and yelling) without falling or waking up... And all of that was just on the way to the site! (I probably should have made a complete post about that trip.)

So, here's to hoping it will not be as "eventful" as the last trip.  I'm sure we will have fun. And I will let everyone know how it was when I get back to civilization.