Camping in the Poconos

Its been years since I last went camping...

This past weekend I took my 10$ second-hand tent, aging second-hand car and a brand new sleeping bag and headed up to the Poconos Mountains. I've been to the Poconos before but under totally different weather conditions. This is me snowboarding down Shawnee Mountain Check-it-out! last winter. This time the Poconos was lush with greenery everywhere!

It's really close to home - just a 1hr 20 minute drive from Somerset, NJ. We got stuck on the I-80 West for about an hour waiting for the police to clear a horrible accident. Someone on a speedbike had crashed and the bike didn't look like a bike anymore...hope their ok.

We were the first of our 9-person group to reach the campsite. The short talk with the receptionist of seeing black bears if your very very lucky set my blood boiling. The thrill was unbelievable. Now I know what that nutcase on "Grizzly Man" was going through :). Shooting ahead in time, I unfortunately didn't see any bears. Black bears are smaller and less aggressive than the grizzly monsters in "Grizzly Man". A more promising vantage point to see the bears was from our raft in the Delaware river the next day. The people at Adventure Sports told us people see them all the time in the corn fields and on the shore drinking from the river. Unfortunately, again I didnt see any.

Anyway, we setup my 10$ tent which I thought was fine but caught lots of criticism from my tent sharer :). It was quite smaller than illustrated on the side of the carrying case. The rest of the group arrived later and I helped them setup their 7-person tent.

After that, we barbecued, lit a campfire, drank tea, setup a hookah, laughed a load and tried to see celestial bodies with my telescope...

The next day we went rafting and canoeing on the high-tide Delaware river. Two of our group got stranded on an island and lost their canoe. The current pushed them into the submerged trees off an island and they were forced to abandon ship. They later recovered it and met us as we were calling for help from a lifeguard's mobile phone :).

Here's some pix:










The temperature dropped a handful into the night.

Definitely an experience worth repeating over and over again. I look forward to going in the coming weeks...