Spontaneous Camping Trip 09 - Part One

I have noticed that when I get bored I become increasingly random, with my attention span reducing to that of a room full of... nope, see, I lost my thought already lol.  Point proven at least.  Anyways as I mentioned the other day I was looking forward to my 10 days off work and wanted to get away for a little while.

Sunday I decided would be a good day to start planning where to go, with the plan to leave Monday (or possibly even Sunday night!).  Let's go to Sydney!  Hmm... I guess technically it would be a good idea to book accommodation in advance before embarking on the 10 hour drive, although the old me would of done it in a heartbeat! (Damn... am I growing up?)

Well turns out trying to get somewhere to camp in the week between Christmas and New Year's a day before you want to book it is a lot harder then it may sound (I am sure you are as surprised to hear that as I was)... so that got ruled out.  A safe bet was to camp at The Grampians National Park as I have been there about 6 times already so I know the area well, lets go!

Monday morning Sabbi and I took off, sweet!  The drive went well and we arrived without a problem.  Set up camp easily enough (although Sabbi tried to argue against me on how I am setting my tent up wrongly... I think I know what I am doing by now lol).  She claims she could of set the entire thing up in 10 minutes to which I obviously scoffed at heavily, so once I had the base done I challenged her to on her own, put on the outer layer that just sits over your base layer which simply needs you to tie the two layers together with the strings provided...

15 minutes later she managed to figure out which way the door should be facing...

My finished tent =)

Spent the rest of the day eating chips, reading my favourite book, in my favourite chair, in perfect weather, can't get much better then that!  All went well until that night when we decided to get a fire going.  Riddle me this people: "Two people are camping, they decide to start a fire, now do they a) Use some matches to light some twigs to build up to a bigger fire b) Forget the matches at home".

If you guessed 'b)' then you'd be right!  That's 1 to you, 0 to me, the battle continues.

I immediately tried my hardest to think back to how Tom Hanks managed to create fire in the movie Cast Away, but all I could think of was Wilson haha!  Wilson was so funny, it was sad when he drifted away... hey look, after googling to find a picture of him I stumbled across his very own Facebook page!  I became a fan =D  I suggest you do the same. No seriously, do it.

No blog is complete without at least one picture of Wilson on it.

I tried rubbing sticks together for like 25 minutes to no avail... I then tried to create sparks by scraping my knife along a rock lol, still nothing.  Hmm... what creates heat?  Oh!  My cigarette lighter plug thingy in my car!  Think now for a minute if you think this would work... got your answer?

Well I can tell you that after literally an hour of trying to burn paper, toilet paper, cardboard, napkins, McDonalds wrappers, leaves, bark and tissues, it is impossible to get it to burn anything lol...

Can you see what is wrong with this picture!?  If you guessed 'It is now day two and there is still branches in it that clearly have not seen a fire the night before' then you guessed right!  That's 2 for you, 0 for me.

Quote of the day "I have the skills, I have the money, I don't have the know how but that will come on the way"  It came about when I was discussing my fantasy of moving to New York next year as you can read about at 'Pointless post'.

Well that was day one!  I think I will split this into two parts as I have been told that many people seem to struggle to read long posts... is that true?  I don't just mean my posts, I mean anyone's posts in general.  Makes it feel like I need to dumb it down so the 'challenged' people can keep up lol.

You can continue onto part two here!