What I learned camping

Hello!

Can't believe it's been over a week since I posted.

My friends and I spent the weekend at the Big Valley Jamboree, 4 day Country Music fest roughly 3 hours from where I live in a town called Camrose.

I grew up on Country music and have drifted in and out of that genre. My iPod has everything but I do find myself in the past few years drifting more towards country again.

The big headliners were Alan Jackson, Luke Bryan and Tim McGraw, though I was really happy to see Travis Tritt.

We skipped the Thursday under the advice of people who've gone before and planned to be there on Friday. Now the day after the 2012 Big Valley I was trying to get us a room in the Best Western that's super close to the concert bowl. No go, they had a monster waiting list. We couldn't get a single room in Camrose, I had reserved a room in the next closest towns which is Wetaskiwin, which would have meant 30min drive there and back.

Well last week in the final hours we discovered a friend who had an extra camp spot with two tickets he was trying to sell. Well I bought the tickets, my friend sold them and they didn't need the camp spot so we got it.

So we thought let's rent an RV, well that was an adventure as it is a long weekend. We got the last RV in the city of Calgary.

 Tada, so armed with sleeping bags and a whole lot junk food (courtesy of one friend) and a variety of alcohol we headed out. No luckily our co-worker who had their 5th Wheel and was our campsite neighbour so he let us plug into his generator or we had no power. Yeah and I packed a hair dryer and straightener.

It was pretty interesting to see us all watch our phone batteries die a slow death. We all bought one of those charging doohickeys at the trade show. Only mine had some power in the battery so I could charge my phone.

None us were RV pros so we paid the RV rental place to empty the tanks, we were super conscious about water use so tried to use the porta potties (ewwwww) except I did get to use one that just cleaned which was sort of awesome. No one had a shower in 3 days, there are shower facilities there for $7, the only thing was you then had to walk across dirt and grass to get back to your camp and you were just as dirty pre shower. Not to mention the competing with a whole lot of other campers.Now when we got there you could call water people or sewage people to service your trailer while you were there. I'm going to look into an out door shower or baby wipes and dry shampoo next year. That's the good thing about a cowboy hat it hides a whole lot of hair sins.

There were RVs and tents everywhere and it was crazy. We were in Family Camping meaning there's a midnight cut off for noise. That didn't happen I could hear lots in the wee hours of the morning that we referred to as coyotes, well the human drunk kind. We had other friends in General Camping which we renamed Hooligan Camping, they actually had someone take a pot full of potatoes from their camp site.

The other type of camping was Reserved which is closer to the event area. I'm voting we try for that if we go next year.

The RV themselves were fascinating, there were monster huge ones with satellite and some that looked like there were built from scratch. There were two that were John Deere inspired painted green with skull wearing a John Deere hat.

There were 20 somethings everywhere and multiple campers had a variety of beer pong set ups. I've never seen that many jean cut offs and bikini tops either.

This was one of the twenty somethings next door to us, on day one I saw him admiring his own abs, here is conked out holding a guitar.

Oh yes lots of guitars and you could hear singing everywhere and in promptu concerts.

One of my favourite concerts was Luke Bryan, at one point it was just him and his guitar. He missed a chord on a song and went back a line to do it over. I think that's what I appreciate about most country artists there down to earth.

To give you an idea of how many people where there.

This was in front of me

This was behind me

think there was somewhere around 25000 people there. I'm happy we went with reserved seats which got us a seat, all the people behind me had to bring lawn chairs and stake out a spot.

After a long soak in the tub when I got home I now feel a little more human. Now I didn't track at all over the last few days mainly due to being very careful with my phone (no power). So now it's back on the wagon.

In my first two weeks of WW online I lost 4lbs total.

Hugs!!!