OUR FIRST TIME

Awe, young love...Okay, everyone who's thinking dirty, get your head's out of the gutter! I'm talking about our first time to CAMP!

John and I met the spring of 1990 and it wasn't long until he was already taking me to meet his family. I took that as a good sign that our relationship was becoming a promising venture. I first met his brother. Then soon after; his parents, sister and uncle. We then got an invitation to spend a weekend out of town with his older cousins Eric and Sharon Bugg.

We all hit it off well and had a fun time together. They were a few years older than us, married, owned their own home and even had their own dog. We considered them to be "way cool". That summer they invited us to join them on a weekend camp out at the Guadalupe River with some of their other friends. No way we were going to miss that! Hangin' out all weekend with the almost thirty-somethings along the banks of the Guadalupe? I could picture it already...Chilling out around an evening fire, trading jokes, sipping wine coolers and gazing at the night stars all with the gentle background sound of The Eagles playing on the radio.

My first indication of how things would go should have been when John and I were loading up for the trip. Oh, but no, I was too in love to see it! My duties were to pack for myself. At age 21 and being single, that meant toothbrush, toothpaste, make-up, hot curlers, hair dryer, hair spray and a bathing suit! John's duties were to provide everything else. And I was pretty confident of his ability, even after his request for me to help him load the top mattress off of his bed into the truck! He assured me the mattress would be much more comfortable than just a sleeping bag and I did agree on that. I was equally impressed that he had gone to great lengths to assemble an ice chest with plenty of drinks and sandwich makings. He threw in a couple of bags of chips and loaves of bread and we were ready to go!

Our first evening with the group was everything I had imagined...and then some! As the night progressed, each couple turned in to their prospective tents and I realized our tent hadn't been assembled yet. When I quizzed John about this, he replied, "We don't have a tent". What? No tent!? I panicked inside! Just the thought of all the critters we would be exposed to made me cringe. I was shocked that he had known we didn't have a tent, but failed to see the importance of not mentioning this to me. But, John had a way of making a bad situation sound good. He said his plan all along was to lay the mattress in the back of the truck so that we could star gaze before we fell asleep. As I closed my eyes, I was thinking how lucky I was to find a guy this romantic. I stopped thinking these thoughts as soon as the first rain drop hit my nose.

Rainstorm. No shelter. Bad experience. It all happened so quickly that I don't remember who bailed us out, but someone rushed a big blue plastic tarp over to us and we spread it out, over our rain soaked bodies. Even under the tarp we could still feel each stinging drop of rain hit and the sound underneath the plastic made sleeping near impossible. It was like the mattress we were on was an island as the bed of the truck began to fill with water. I knew we'd be the laughing stock of the campers, but I didn't fully understand why until I awoke to every one's jeering at their morning discovery.

The newcomers left all of their food out. That was us. White bread and potato chips were strewn all about the campsite. A raccoon apparently had his way with our sandwich fixings. My embarrassment over the sleeping arrangements quickly faded. After we spent the next half hour picking up the remnants, many of the other girls left for the bath house. I followed along, but without the real necessities; such as soap, shampoo and a towel. Our cousin Sharon helped me with that too. By the end of the camp out, John and I had become the "moocher couple". While the other couples wowed us with their culinary skills on propane stoves for breakfast we found ourselves having to beg and borrow for our rations.

You would think that this experience would have us running as far away from camping as possible. But instead, we were hooked. Hooked on camping, and hooked on each other. And so began our future.

The top photo is me and John after we first met. The bottom is our "way cool" cousins, Eric and Sharon Bugg.