I have completed another one of my Day Zero goals (“go camping”)! Corner and I went camping in Big Sur this weekend. We left shortly after work on Friday and arrived at Big Sur Campground & Cabins just after 7pm. We set up our tent and then headed to Nepenthe for some dinner. We ate an AMAZING meal of bread, goat cheese and roasted garlic, salad with bleu cheese dressing, and vegetarian lasagna. Then we drove back to the campground, sat around the campfire for a bit, and crashed way too early.
On Saturday we woke up to the sound of screaming children and made eggs and sausage for breakfast. Then we started another fire and made s’mores while I read my O’Reilly book on HTML (I know, my life is soooooo exciting that I read books on HTML code). The campground also had soft serve ice cream cones for $1 so we took advantage of that (yum!). Then we took a nap, got up and made cheeseburgers for dinner. They were quite possibly the most delicious cheeseburgers ever.
Then we hung out by the fire drinking wine until we took ANOTHER nap because we had to get up at midnight to make the drive down to the Esalen Institute and use the public baths/hot springs from 1am-3am. It was an interesting experience, to say the least. Esalen is a fancy spa/retreat place that opens up their hot springs to the public from 1am-3am. It’s clothing-optional and limited to 20 people per night. You have to park way far away and walk down a giant hill on foot so that you don’t wake up the people paying beaucoup bucks to stay the night on Esalen’s property. Sounds weird, but you can’t argue with the $20 pricetag since I’m pretty sure it costs hundreds (if not thousands) to attend a weekend retreat at this place. Anyway, my skin felt pretty fantastic after early 2 hours of lounging around in hot water listening to the ocean waves crash along the cliffs.
Of course we had to take Highway 1 to get there, which is super windy, and apparently no good at all when you haven’t eaten in nearly 12 hours. Corner and I both weren’t feeling so well after the ride home. We crawled into our sleeping bags and passed out for a few hours before we had to wake up. IT WOULD RAIN on the morning we had to pack up the tent. Then we had to hightail it home because I had to drop Corner off at the airport so he could fly to Iowa for an interview.
All in all, camping was pretty fun and I would probably do it again.
Pros: good food, lots of time with the bf
Cons: made me wish Nigel was with us, my Thermarest inflatable camping mat broke (I’ve had this thing for 4 years (since my drum corps days, and that’s right, I just used parentheses inside parentheses, what are you going to do about it?) and it breaks the first time I use it outside??? UGH)
