Lake Maria State Park and St. Cloud OUT Film Festival

Woke up from deep sleep around 1:30am. Freezing! The mattress was situated so the breeze went right down our sleeping bag. Made the 0 degree bag worthless! We were too disoriented to change the mattress around. lol So we put on hats instead and I put on my Mexican sweater and some socks. Then we hunkered down. At some point in there, Emma Blue made her way in the sleeping bag with us. More warmth!(= I put another blanket in for Tori too. Awake every 2 hours or so until we got up around 8:15am. Around 5am a great drizzling rain started that lasted about 2 hours. We liked that! Got up and packed before our 9:30am goal. A first!

We went directly back to I-94 so that we wouldn't get lost. Well, except that we did get turned around at one point on our way to the interstate. lol We stopped at Nelson Brothers outside of St. Cloud for an awesome breakfast! Then got cleaned up at the next exit rest area. Perfect! By then it was about 11:30am and we had to hustle to make our 12pm movie in St. Cloud. That was the whole reason we were in the area so it would have been bad to miss it! We got there with 5 minutes to spare... after getting a wine and a coffee. lol Gotta like a movie theatre like that! Except that it wasn't a movie theatre at all. It was a Playhouse/Music venue called Pioneer Place on Fifth that they'd rearrange to play movies for this festival. So we saw Training Rules about Rene Portland who was a homophobic coach at Penn State for about 25 years. It was part of the St. Cloud OUT Film Festival. After the documentary, home. No stops! 3pm. It took the expected 2ish hours this time. Phew!

So we got to have a nice afternoon at home before going back to work tomorrow. Good start to our camping season!

First Outing of 2009 - Lake Maria State Park

We got a later start than usual. A "serious talk" kept us occupied in the a.m. Packing took little time before we headed out. But we had to stop at the Co-op for organic beef hotdogs, organic chilimac, and some Izze drinks. Then a stop at Caribou for road coffee and a quick detour home to pick up a couple things we'd forgotten before *really* heading out. It was noon. A stop at Target in Lakeville for yet another air mattress (this one with built in air pump) and we were *really* *really* off. We were headed for Sand Dunes State Park. Mainly interstate. When we were about 20 miles outside St. Cloud, I asked Lorrie to pull out the Mapquest printout. Oops! We had passed our exit. We're wanderers so we decided to give it a shot without turning back. That was our second mistake. Before setting off further, we stopped in Monticello to share a huge burger and some fries. Then we were ready to find our site. But... as there usually is a but... we were detoured very slightly because I saw one of my trucks in a parking lot. For sale! And unlocked. So we got some photos of that! Back on track... sortof... Birkoff, my phone navigation system, led us very far astray and we ended up in some small city park in Big Lake, MN. I think that's where we were anyway. A police officer, who we agreed was cute, saw us pass by a couple times and then stopped to ask if we were looking for something. We told her and she radioed in for directions. It's a huge park so the fact that she didn't know offhand was pretty telling about how far off we were. Those directions were errant as well. lol Lorrie finally pulled out the antiquated folded paper map and we used that. To find nothing! lol Because it's Sand Dunes State Forest now. So we found that and we found the Reserve that it's a attached to. There was also our back up plan campground, Ann's Lake Campground, which actually did end up being within Sand Dunes State Forest. Very confusing! According to our handy dandy book, The Best in Tent Camping: Minnesota: A Guide for Car Campers Who Hate RVs, Concrete Slabs, and Loud Portable Stereos, the campground is open all year. Wrong! Closed until May 1st. Arrgh! All that driving around.

So, on to our backup backup plan. We usually aren't this prepared with backup plans so this is a good thing! Maria Lake State Park was the destination. We used the paper map though still got turned around slightly at one point. We got there safe and sound. It was self check-in and all hike-in/backpacking sites. We drove to the parking area for the site we paid for (B3) and walked to it with Emma Blue. We decided it was way too long for Tori to walk or for us to carry her. So, though we paid for the walk-in site, we set up in one of the group sites near the parking area. Tori was able to walk that distance pretty well.

We got Lorrie's tent set up then she took care of inside the tent (mattress, sleeping bags, dog beds) and I started a fire and dinner. Hotdogs over the fire and then cut up into our chilimac. Yummy! Then we chilled, talked, played with the fire, etc. Seemed like it was going to rain so everything went back to D'Azul or into the tent. 9:30pm and in we go.

An early night after taking about 4-1/2 hours to complete a 2-hour drive today! Crazy!