We’ve been thinking of camping for a while now and our first choice was Akadia National Park. We decided to go Memorial day weekend so that we have enough time to enjoy it. All good and dandy, but when we decided to reserve a spot, it was all taken up. We looked around for other spots and decided to go to Cranberry Lake in the Adirondacks.
Of course we don’t have any camping gear so I got a tent – Mountain Hardwear Lightpath 3 – and two cheap sleeping bags with 35F rating.
So since the trip was going to be at least 6 hours we decided to leave early morning and be there around noon. Again, it would have been nice if we didn’t go to bed 1am because of all the cooking prep we did. Stil after a shower at 5am it wasn’t too bad.

Or maybe it was… Few minutes after we left I started to get road sickness. I tried to relax and watch ahead of the car, but didn’t help much. After we passed the Hudson we stopped. I had to trow up because didn’t want to get better. Also we decided that it will help if I drive and so it happened. I drove the entire way to Cranberry Lake. No problem there, at least I was fine.

So we stopped a couple of more times for food and bathroom and around 2pm we were there.

The campground map was a bit misleading because we were supposed to be in a fairly private site, but it turned out we are sharing with others. It wasn’t a problem really because they were away all day.

After we arrived the first task was to put the tents up. It was quite hot and all kinds of bugs were flying around, but we came prepared with 3 types of bug sprays.

Of course, the second task was to prepare food. A few gathered dry branches and a match later we had our first fire going.

The grill went on top and on it a few pork chops

After we ate I took a nap because everyone else slept in the car. After that we took a walk around the park. I also went fishing. All in all the afternoon was pretty lazy. It wasn’t long before we were hungry again so we repeated the exercise with the fire. This time we put some chicken and veggies skewers on the grill .

After the first night it was clear that we had made two big mistakes. First we didn’t have any sleeping pads, so in the morning I felt like someone had been hitting me with a stick all night. Also we didn’t bring any camping chairs, so we couldn’t exactly sit around the fire, but still neither of these were not enough to make our stay bad.

So after breakfast the first morning, we tried one of the local trails. Everyone had their backpack full of camera gear, I decided to fill mine with water and clothes and basic outdoors gear. The actual trail was pretty nice and the nice part was that that day the weather was cool and overcast. After about 45mins we arrived at the top of the trail. It was still pretty thick bush, so we couldn’t really see the lake the way we expected. But there was a nice rock there that we used to take a few air shots

After we came back it was again for food so we coocked the rest of the meat we had. The afternoon we were too lazy to do another trail, so I went fishing again, Dari went shooting… everyone found something to do.

For dinner we had the leftovers of the meat and the salad and after an hour around the fire (sitting on logs, rocks etc) we went to bed.

The way back was again pretty long with a few heavy traffic patches so we arrived around 5pm in Stamford. Right there we decided that our new limit for camping will be 2hr drive