Ok, so the first night sucked. So did the next day.

 Now, one thing about living in the Southeast is that we have a wildly variable climate, and a heck of a lot of wildlife.

Those two factors immediately come into play on our very first camping trip (yes, this is still the same trip as the bees). 

That night, after recovering from the assault on our yellowjacket neighbors and settling into bed, we had a moment we still reference...

Let me set the scene for you.  We picked a night with a full moon on purpose as our first night out. Our tent is white, so the light of the full moon bathes us like soft velvet draped over a marble sculpture.  The air is dry and cool, but not cold, almost perfectly room temperature. Late-season frogs are chirping in trees, and miles off in the far distance you can hear cows settling into the night in their fields. The air is still but not stifling, and all is perfectly well with the world.  A tree frog drops onto the tent roof, and we spend what feels like days snuggled on an air mattress with all three of our dogs in a big cozy heap, watching this little frog slowly climb up the slope of our roof.

Snuggling sweetly in as she falls asleep, my wife turns to me and says "it's so peaceful out here..."

Immediately upon which, a cicada mere feet above our heads explodes with the sound of a thousand fire alarms blaring simultaneously inside a metal trashcan.  The sound waves from this tiny insect were so deafening that I swear to this day I could feel a physical pressure bearing down on me from them. It was as though the forest, unable to cope with us in any other way, sent a riot control squad to pin us down in our bed while it cooked up plans for the next day. 

Exhausted, battered, stung, and pinned in place by the dead weight of sound pressing us into our bed like g-forces in an accelerating roller coaster, we fell asleep. 

The next day we awoke refreshed and ready for something new! Our dogs had yet to see the place we found in our previous hikes, so we leashed Nisba up and set off on foot.  The two others proved they could walk along just fine, but Nisba being a hound, well she likes to follow her nose a bit more than she likes to follow her humans. 

We got to the bottom, and started to set up camp... when it immediately started to pour down rain.

Against my wife's protestations, I insisted we head back up the hill, because I didn't want all our things (and selves) to get wet and add to the already hilarious litany of things that had gone wrong. 

This was the wrong call. About halfway back to camp, my wife slipped and twisted her ankle, spraining it badly.  We got to the tent, elevated her foot until the next day after the rain stopped, and then went home.

Forest 1, us 0. 

Episode 1

 

So we rejoin our intrepid hosts at the first campsite.  This one's accessible by truck, so it's much easier to get to, and we can leash up our dogs and just hang out.

We bring our firepit from the city, pick up a nice large tent that we thought looked neat, and headed out for a few days.

Now, there's something funny about where I'm standing when I take this picture, but I won't know it until later:

Thing is, there's a yellowjacket nest immediately below my feet. I just didn't know it, because everything had been going so swimmingly all day long.

Later that afternoon, I'm sitting in the blue chair, right where it is now. My lovely wife, not pictured, is sitting in a chair, also not pictured, on the other side of the fire. Our big white hound dog is sitting next to her, and the other dogs are in the tent relaxing.

All of a sudden, sheer chaos explodes around me.

Nisba, the hound, screams like someone dropped a hot coal into her bed and jumps clean out of her harness, wrapping her lead around my wife's chair and knocking over a number of small items in the process. She then bolts around the corner of the tent with my wife starting to scream too as a look or horrified confusion spreads over her face. 

I jump out of my chair and run around the corner to where the two of them are huddled, both in absolute shock, where my wife is frantically slapping yellowjackets out of Nisba's fur while stripping off her own clothes, which are filled with them as well.

I help rip the yellowjackets off both of them, detangle and strip them both down, and shove them both bodily into the tent and zip it behind them.

Somehow in this process, despite having to pull yellowjackets out of the skin of two of my favorite people, I've managed to not only avoid any stings, but also the attention of the swarm. These hellish little bastards are for some reason treating me like I don't exist.

I'd like to say there was some manly theme playing in my head, or that I said something potent and amazing, but I think I probably just said something like "stay inside, I'll figure this out".

Being careful to keep the smoke from the fire in between myself and the swarm, I saw what had happened.

Those of you smarter than me have already figured this out, of course--there was a hole in the ground just buzzing with yellow, angry little needlejets who were upset that we put a firepit next to their home and then let a dog lay down on top of their foyer.

I am assured by the only observer to this act that my next actions came swiftly and confidently, but not being outside my body to observe, I have to take her word for it.  In the first discus throw of my life, I picked up the lid to a cast-iron dutch oven and slung it over to the nest, where it plopped down directly on top of the hole.

Perfect--though there were still dozens of yellowjackets in the air, at least they could not call for reinforcements.

I quickly mixed up a solution of kerosene, dish soap, and water, and had myself a little "bowl o'death".  Not necessarily the most environmentally friendly thing in the world, but a cup of kerosene on the ground is a lot better than this buzzing tornado we find ourselves in. 

Good news is, a tiny bit of kerosene on a yellowjacket is nearly instant death, so I started slinging my ad-hoc bug spray at them to knock them out of the air, and then once the aerial ranks had been dealt with, poured the rest directly into the gullet of their once proud house.

Our first misadventure had been handled, with only minor casualties to the family, and a little bit of traumatic and unintentional training for our dog. 

Time to show the family and explore a little

 Now, my wife and I aren't "family" people. We have our dogs, but we're not exactly interested in kids.  That said, you've gotta call in the relatives to come inspect your smallholding, right?

It's difficult to say if the kids were impressed with our choice of location... I suspect they mainly thought we were crazy, and that it was hot, and that there were monsters somewhere in the woods that were going to eat them.

Several of those things were true, in fact. And continue to be, at least at times. But we did keep coming back to that same spot we had found in our first few trips out to explore.  Something about this little bend in the creek seemed so welcoming, even in different seasons:

Doesn't that look welcoming? We thought so too. 

Which of course is exactly why our first camping trip was nowhere near this spot!

I know, "what the hell", right?  Well, that little hollow is only accessible by foot or by ATV, and while we had feet, we didn't really want to hump our supplies all the way down to it.  So we figured any significant progress down there would have to wait.

Instead, I present to you, "camping trip number one," otherwise known as "the one with all the bees":

...to be continued in the next post, for the sake of dramatic suspense (even though I'm uploading all of these on the same day).

Adrift in a sea of green

Many cultures have stories about what came first, what was there "in the beginning", so to speak.  In our case, that was forest. Dense, dense forest. The kind of forest that hasn't seen a human being in years.

I'm going to try not to give too much away, as this is the Internet so the safest thing for me is to assume that anyone reading this anonymously is a terrible person (prove me wrong, Internet), and I'm not super interested in someone coming to my home in the middle of the night to murder me with an axe.

Also, my axe is sharper than yours, so back off, ya Hinterkaifeck-lookin' ass. 

The short version is that our "city house" is in Nashville, Tennessee, and our homestead isn't. It is in the Southeastern United States, but that's all you get.

So here's what it looked like when we arrived:

Admit it, how long did it take you to notice the hammocks there?

After bushwhacking our way through our new jungle, we eventually found a little corner that was just... almost eerily welcoming. It felt right, right from the first time we saw it.  We settled in, strung up some hammocks, and took a nap.

Fairly inauspicious beginnings, eh? Trust me, it stays inauspicious for a while.