DEALING WITH UN-HAPPY CAMPERS

"One always looking for flaws leaves too little time for construction."

Try as I might, sometimes it is pretty hard not to take other people's negativity personally.  Why is that you might ask?  Well, its simply because it pisses me off that after taking the time and effort (by that I mean hours, weeks, months... even years) to develop an idea, create a concept, motivate and invest myself, and then finally put my ideas to paper (keyboard)...that there are always those people that will take the same time and energy to crap on a person's lively hood and take all the fun out of it.  


I'm not talking about the usual "Debbie Downer" or "Negative Neil" who might be defined in one of the following ways:

• Someone who throws in a negative comment, says something terribly depressing, typically only tangentially related to the present circumstance or topic of conversation.

• A person with an incessant need to bring down the collective mood of a group chill or forum.

• A busy-body pessimist, one who looks on the downside of things, criticizes relentlessly, sees the glass as half empty...you get the picture.

In keeping with today's technology, I'm leaning more towards the following definition:

• Someone that finds it necessary to use social media to post negative remarks and/or make comments to create unnecessary conflict/controversy to fulfill their own boredom;  or to satisfy the personal belief that somewhere along the line, they have obtained a level of intelligence far more superior to that of the general public....and they feel the need to add their two-cents in on any, and every thing, from breast feeding to the molecular structure of gasoline.

It is the latter nuisance that tends to ruffle my feathers. Toxic people that can't help but attach their unprovoked commentary onto your posts and photos, hoping to egg a response out of another fan/follower...or you.  Up to now (hence this blog post), I've attempted to grin and bear it.  Ya know, be professional.  Then I thought, wait a second!  Let's define "professional".

A professional is a person who is engaged in a certain activity, or occupation, for gain or compensation as means of livelihood; such as a permanent career, not as an amateur or pastime.

So, let's break this down. (a) I'm not getting paid to endure anyone's wrath. My time and efforts are strictly on a volunteer basis. It has actually cost me to pursue this endeavor. (b) My education/career is not web design, photography, writing, survival tactics or publishing. (c) I'm no expert at anything. (Maybe complaining, but only because I've been told that... I don't see it.  Really.)  (d) Although most of the time, I find myself engaging in creative and intellectually challenging "work" with Bound4Burlingame.com, B4B Facebook Page, Camping Concepts 101, B4B You Tube Channel, Twitter, or our Blah...Blah...Blog, NOWHERE do I imply the quality of my workmanship is impeccable, or professional grade... or even of decent quality.

Many people hold a "pro" to a higher standard, thus finding it a necessity to place a great deal of trust  in them.  Honestly, I am an admitted amateur web designer and hobbyist camper, so due to my voluntary lack of professionalism...I suggest ....no, implore you, to NOT hold me to any strict code of conduct enshrining rigorous ethical and/or moral obligations.  I plant myself beside you, not above you. We are equal.  I know only what myself, family, friends, and acquaintances have experienced and willingly shared.  I've always felt that any one person knows no more, or no less, then another.  They only possess different knowledge.

When you do visit my site, or social pages, I ask you to have an open mind.  Everyone has the ability to listen, absorb, learn, familiarize, observe, recognize, accomplish, enlighten, and educate others.  Don't be jealous, or vindictive, when you come across someone making an attempt to share their passions with fellow enthusiasts.  Embrace it, be part of it.  Bestow your knowledge.  Participate on a fun, yet respectable level. Share in the adventure, by sharing your adventures.

If your goal when you frequent my social network pages is to criticize, reprimand, chastise, judge, nit-pick, bash, or give bad press to my ideas/performance/aspirations/attempts at humor ...  PLEASE...do a friggin reverse, and try focusing on yourself.  How about if you go to YOUR own wall, or blog, or Twitter account etc., and post a stupid, smart ass, sad, holier-than-thou, woeful, or depressing status/photo/comment which conveys your spitefulness regarding life in general. Then sit back and watch the morale of all that see it, plummet to the ground.  Get the hint?  Good.

Pass this on...or share these thoughts with a Debbie Downer you know ;-)  Maybe they'll get the hint too.

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BINGO & BURLINGAME... OR BUST

Who's afraid of Jack Frost nipping at your nose... your toes...your fingers...your ears? Say "I". Or maybe it is more like AYE AYE AYE! 

Man-oh-man, as if we didn't freeze our butts off enough opening weekend at Burlingame, we turned around the next weekend and did it again. Certainly, it couldn't have been THAT bad then! Honestly, I really needed to get some stuff done for Bound4Burlingame.com. I guess we're just gluttons for punishment. Whatever the case, I must say, we did in fact, get spanked pretty severely.

I'll admit we kind of brought it on ourselves. Thanks to the wonders of Doppler Radar, we already knew it was a 40% chance of rain. Fifteen rechecks later, it was officially official.  We would indeed be "damp camping" part of the weekend.  We wouldn't realize until much later that we were so distracted by the dark clouds looming across our iphone screens, that we neglected to take notice of the actual expected temperatures.  But trust me, one or two degrees does not make a huge difference when the thermometer is already hovering around the freezing point.  It was only about 5:30pm at this point, so being wet AND cold AND hungry hadn't even began to enter our minds (or bodies yet). I didn't even pay much thought when my boyfriend remarked (numerous times) that he was on day two of a horrible aching pain developing around his jaw line.

The thing we were actually concentrating on at that particular minute, was getting to Foxwood's Casino in time for the night Bingo session. Which in fact did happen. What didn't happen?   Well, that would be the ability to leave promptly after we dabbed our last losing card. You would think that at that second... or at some point over the next 4 1/2 hours, one of us would have noticed that another box on the weekend's Fail Card had been checked off.  But noooooo!  I guess we were probably too busy trying to track down a cocktail waitress for one of casino's infamous, yet scarce, "free" drinks.

Not like we had a choice or anything, but it was past time to leave.  The clock was chiming 3:00am and the only hint of anything that resembles a smile om my face, was solely based on the fact that I still had a shirt on my back. 

We weren't out of the parking garage yet when quicker than a slot machine could swallow up your last $20 bill, I got an awful feeling.  I couldn't quite put my finger on it.  Over the next 24 hours, I would become acutely aware that it was probably the same feeling that comes when an underdog competitor is standing center ring surrounded by the tag team of Mother Nature, Poseidon, The Joker, Father Time, Cujo, The Frito Bandito, Frosty the Snowman, and Dr. Feelgood.  Forget the Rumble in the Jungle...Ali and Foreman would have run screaming from the pines had they known they were walking blindfolded into the smack down of the century.

I realize now I don't want to relive the gory details. I'll try to make a long story short. It was cold and pouring rain as we left the casino. I was still dry at that point, so I couldn't quite tell how bitter it was yet.  We contemplated our decision to camp out...or I should say my boyfriend did. The pain and swelling in his face had multiplied in mere hours and the idea of turning around and heading back north to home (and a local hospital's emergency room) seemed a more attractive plan to him. After digging through my pocketbook to retrieve the remnants of some discarded pain meds, he reluctantly agreed to trudge forward to Rhode Island. 

We started setting up in the downpour around 3:30am. Progress was slow due to freezing limbs, limited visibility... and lack of help.  My boyfriend's spent that hour attempting to build a fire in the rain. Guess the pain meds had set in because his pain level didn't seem so severe. The next surprise came when I opened our canvas bag to retrieve the air mattress, tent, lanterns, and the outdoor rug. 

I saw orange nylon. However, the only orange nylon material I knew of belonged to a salvage tent we picked up at an auction.  Certainly, this orange wasn't part of the tent designed to fit a single 4-foot-high boy scout.  Certainly, he couldn't have made the mistake of packing the wrong tent. Certainly, he saw that a yard of nylon couldn't possibly be the 4-person spring season tent we've always used in the past. Certainly, this is a joke.  Certainly...certainly...oh God!

We wedged in the tiny tent (of course one of the poles were missing so it was about 1 1/2 foot high on one side and 2 1/2 feet on the other). The queen air mattress was of no use. Sleeping bags absorbed wetness from the sides of the tent, and through the ground. Heads in hats, on wet pillows. Wet feet in wet socks. Wet heavy hunting parkas, over wet fall jackets, over wet hooded sweatshirts, over wet long-sleeved shirts and wet jeans.  I wondered if hypothermia was a possibility. I was sure it was. So cold. So very cold. And the wind...would we wake to the Wicked Witch of the West's feet peeking out from under our wilderness abode?  The only thing louder than the wind and rain, was my stomach. The hunger pains started taking repeated blows to my gut. Soggy corn chips were all we could muster up without disturbing our cave. I was gagging on my fourth limp chip when I heard the first howl. Coyotes. I had heard them many times before coming from the other side of the Pond.  Unfortunately, the howls set off every owl in the park. Sleep, if that's what you could call it, came in 5-minute intervals.  Within a couple hours, it became apparent that the emergency room could not wait any longer.

Despite the fact that I was still tired, grumpy, and starving (not even a stop at McDonald's for a .99 cent coffee!), the morning's pain (mine, not his) was diminished as we dragged ourselves through the emergency room doors. I saw the look on the receptionist's face as her eyes rose to meet ours. I think I actually heard her gasp.  This wonderful woman must have seen the desperation in our eyes (again, mine not his).  Westerly Hospital is the best! Within minutes of arriving, he was seen, made comfortable in a room, pumped full of morphine, blood drawn, and on his way to CT-scan. They later found the culprit was a soft tissue infection.  A couple weeks regimen of antibiotics and pain killers were prescribed.

We spent most of the afternoon drying out, resetting up, taking cold showers, browsing Walmart, and checking out the rebuilding going on down at Misquamicut Beach. Although my boyfriend surely felt like Hurricane Sandy had also paid him a visit, he insisted we return to Foxwood's Bingo that night.  He was pretty much a trooper (ok- a grumbling soldier in the trenches) the rest of our stay. From now on, I'll be paying more attention to the weather forecast B-4 we go to C-A-M-P-O!

THE CONCEPT OF BOUND4BURLINGAME

I always thought I knew Burlingame State Campground in Rhode Island pretty darn good...partly because I had been camping there on and off for 25+ years, and partly because I thought I could trust my memory. Why was it then that every time I showed up at the office, and every campsite on my "favorites" list was already occupied, did I begin to tremor with fear? Breaking out in a cold sweat while standing at the front of a winding line of 50 or so inpatient campers is always such a bad scene. Check the board, check the map, check the board, check the map.  Does it look private? Do you think the trees are Pine or Maple? Remember... I can't carry a bucket of water far with my back! How close is the spigot? 101 questions race through my head, and almost every time I hear myself saying..." Is that the one that we stayed at that had/was....???" And since I'm pretty sure I've stayed at that particular site at least once (and i remember it being decent enough)...and we are happy to even get a site on a Friday at 7:00pm... we snatch up our treasure map and head off to set up. 

And then quicker then my teenage daughter can come up with an excuse not to clean her room ...the smile is wiped....no, completely blasted ... off our faces! It's definitely NOT the site we camped at before. Not even close! I feel like I've just been bamboozled by a cartographer con man! Not only is the site tiny...its wedged between two sparsely wooded sites with --- let me count... - 1-2-3-4-5-6-7...yes 7 (OMG!) tents combined between the two. OMG AGAIN...look at at array of speaker equipment on the picnic table! Is their dog going to stop barking or what? And it looks like we will have to drive to the bathrooms. Great. I guess I don't need to go into details about how the evening played out. Use you imagination :(    Oh yea, then multiple that experience times about 25 stays.

At some point, I say to myself....I wish I had an actual picture of every campsite in this park so I know what I'm getting! And so it began.  I spent countless hours through October walking through the park snapping pictures and dodging deer. I've come up with ideas for forums and content that hopefully will appeal to fellow campers. The work is sporadic, and often mind boggling to say the least. I often wonder how long it might take a professional web designer..or 5th grader, to accomplish what I've crackerjacked in all these daunting hours. Them, 2 vs. me, 200? When I look in mirror, am I not the same person who can conquer the Sagas of Candy Crush and Bubble Witch in mere minutes? Have I not cleared the path to Victory Lane with my Coin Dozer... while Hanging with Friends? And how many people can Ruzzle their way into the Speed Spelling Society (SSS for short) in under one minute?

Please bear with me during the developmental stages... and probably never-ending (re)construction of my BOUND4BURLINGAME.com website.  In lieu, I present you with the BOUND4BURLINGAME Facebook Page! I welcome and consider all input, ideas and advice. Make yourself known....take a seat by my virtual campfire. Let's share the love of the outdoors and camping with each other!