Palpz goes camping with friends!
I get a call from a friend from high school, one of those I don't see all that often now a days. He, another friend of mine, and his girlfriend are going camping, and wish me to come. Let's call them Ryan, Chris, and Ashley.
I should have known what I was in for, knowing these guys. They like to burn stuff. It's amusing. I remember one time we were in Fish Creek Park, the largest park in Calgary, and had a little fire going. Ryan brought some sulphur pellets that he got from god knows where, and decided to toss em in the fire. The smoke was quite noxious.
So, Ryan picks me up early Saturday morning and we drive off. The place we're headed to is in Kananaskis. It's a bit off the beaten track, and we do have to do a little off roading to get there.
Now, this place is of course stunningly beautiful. The weather is perfect, with a high of 28 C, and a nice breeze to help us keep cool.
It's also not exactly the type of place someone comes when they want to spend some quiet time in the splendor of nature. Instead, it's the kind of place that people go to if they want to cruise around on dirt bikes, have big fires, and set off fireworks.
Ryan and Chris fit right in.
We get there and find where Chris and Ashley set up camp the night before, and quickly set up. The next task on the agenda was to gain firewood for the night.
We set off up a hill a bit, and start clearing the place of some of it's deadwood, with help from Ryan's chainsaw.
Ryan ties up some nice medium sized trees behind his Volvo, and drags them back to our campsite. He manages to get about 6 logs.
So, we've got a nice load of dry wood. So of course we go and make two more logging trips.
We've got more wood than you can shake a stick at. What to do next? Start burning stuff of course.
A nearly empty can of gas is set up on a log and lit. And then we break out the BB Gun. 'twas impressive how it's flare up when it was hit. And then when it was punctured after hitting the same spot twice. Most impressive.
After a bit of that, we had to break out the big guns. The potato guns that is.
Man those things are fun. And since we had brought about 30 lbs of potatos, we had plenty of ammo. Ryan also had some arrows he had gotten at a garage sale, which were stuck into the tube in front of the potato. It took about 15 tries, but we eventually punctured the gas can, but not before leaving 4 arrows stuck in some of the trees behind it.
After some more time spent shooting high velocity tubers at various stuff, if is discovered that one of the cans of hair spray, one of the Alberto brands, is totally inadequate for the purposes of launching food items.
So we shoot it with the BB Gun. Watching a can spew a it's pressurized contents, flying around the campsite for about 10 seconds, was one of the coolest things I've seen for quite a while.
Anyhow, I think you can see how things went. Alcohol was consumed, a lot of wood was burned, spud cannons were used to launch fireworks quite high in the sky.
Anyways, we're going to pack up the next day, and Ryan decides that he doesn't want to keep the shitty tent he lent me. So we have to get rid of it somehow.
Anyone care to guess how?
It's dragged over to the remains of our massive fire the night before, and a small hole is cut into the top. Some gas is poured in, and we give it a bit of time to let the vapours fill the tent. We then pour a path of gas from one side of the site to the tent, and flick a match to the ground.
Fwoosh! It was quite satisfying.
So yes, anyways, we clean the place up and head home.
Quite a nice weekend. I must do this more often.