Throwback Thursday

When I was a kid in the 1960s and 70s, my family did a lot of camping in the summertime. We never went too far from home, usually to campgrounds in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. After I left home I stopped going. My first apartment out on my own was camping enough, I suppose. It wasn't until the late 1980s that I started to go camping again, this time in California. Ken was reluctant at first, but he got into the spirit and came to enjoy sleeping in a tent on the ground. We did a lot of camping in Northern California, in the mountains, on the coast, and in the Southern California deserts (including two camping trips in Death Valley). We also ventured into Nevada and Utah at one point.

The truck belonged to a friend of Sue's from Nevada who came along with us.

It was our friend Sue who got us into it, at first letting us borrow her old tent and sharing her camping supplies. It wasn't long before we had our own tent (which we still have) and collection of camping gear for our trips. This photo is from around 1988 or 1989. We were with Sue in the Tuolumne Meadow campground at Yosemite. The mornings were chilly up at that altitude (about 2,600 meters or 8,600 feet) and we enjoyed warming up with our morning coffee next to the campfire.

We did a lot of hiking on that trip and spent a day down in Yosemite Valley. We also enjoyed cooking dinners and eating and drinking (we always took a good supply of wine on camping trips) and star-gazing late into the night. Good times.