Don’t invite me to your family camping trip – I will briefly ruin it

I suck at social situations, I really do.  I don’t know why I try or even get myself into these situations.

I went to Allegheny last weekend to get information from park police and to do some hiking, as my friend and I have a goal to hike every trail before the winter hits (or maybe it was ‘before we die’)…and noticed a few days before the weekend that a girl we know will be up there with her boyfriend the same weekend.  I thought “great, we’ll knock off another trail and visit them for a little while….catch up with the times”

We arrived around 3pm, talked to park police, picked the trail and completed the trail.  After a few texts, I learned the girl we knew was here with her boyfriend and they were both at another girl’s cabin.  She invited us to the other girl’s cabin and told us what trail she was staying at but not the number of the cabin.

After 15 minutes of driving we get to the trail and we can’t find them by driving around.  I called her up and she was going to tell me when she saw my Jeep.  Turning past a long driveway she says “STOP!! Go back!” – we look up the driveway and their cabin is PACKED with people.

Are you horrified at the sound of that?  I am.  I just came out of peaceful, quiet woods…I want to go geocaching, I want to work for park police, I want to go to school for forestry.  With just one other person with me in the woods for 5 hours, I’m comfortable and happy.  Nobody is loud or obnoxious, drunk or destructive.

At the cabin, they have a big family ordeal…which is cool because I did the same thing when I was a kid and am glad that people are carrying on a tradition by taking their kids where THEIR parents brought them…I’m just terrified of being grown up instead of a kid at this cabin.  I’d rather be doing kid activities, honestly.  Pulling up to park, I didn’t realize they had dogs around and was going pretty fast…strike 1.  There were so many cars there than we had to park in front of somebody else’s cabin and walk up to where they were.

Walking up, we must look ridiculous.  Everybody is there with a couple and then it’s just me and Ryan…coming from a hike in the woods.  Nobody believes we were just there to hike, I’m sure.  They all thought we came down to hang out with Amy, visit, drink…possibly stay the night.  I even said something like “no no that’s not the reason we came down here.”  I’m not driving 1.5 hours to hang out with a girl and her boyfriend in the woods.  Somebody asked “so, you came here for one afternoon…to go on a hike…?”  Well fuck, excuse me for liking the outdoors.  As if I don’t compare to their grand family camping adventure.  I thought this the entire time, which made it difficult to feign warmth when I talked to people.  I HAD to talk to people otherwise then we’d look REALLY ludicrous…and Ryan wasn’t going to do the talking.

I talked to the girl I knew about lifeguarding and told her the story about when I gave private swim lessons to two women that I referred to as “two, big-momma’s-house looking black ladies” oof…strike 2.  Pretty sure I got away with that one though, because the girl returned with another jokingly-racist quip.

Later on in the conversation, I was complaining about something and said “shit…fuck” at the end of a sentence.  Kids were around.  Strike 3…it’s time to go.  Ryan told me later on that a few minutes after I said that, somebody else said “and that’s why we don’t swear around here.”

It’s official, we’re two jackasses who came out of the woods and ruined a family camping trip.  Time to head out.

I look behind me towards the Jeep that I can barely see because it’s the part of dusk where everything looks foggy.  I can see silhouettes of their children in the middle of the trail, walking somewhere.  I say “I hope I don’t hit any of those kids…   can’t avoid them all!”  – jokingly of course.  It didn’t incite as much laughter as I had hoped.  We got up, said a quick goodbye and booked the hell out of there before we caused more damage.

So glad I wasn’t there the entire weekend.