Day 1: Asheville. A mad dash.
The first leg of our trip to California is a solid camping marathon made up of short day driving sprints. We set our first leg to Asheville on a Thursday, after an important doctor’s appointment I scheduled months ago and didn’t want to miss.
Unfortunately, Murphy’s Law meant that everything took far longer than expected, and we ended up leaving town around 4:30pm, right smack in the middle of rush hour.
The first 20 minutes of driving were tense, as we immediately discovered that the cargo carrier sits quite low to the ground, and scrapes the ground with a screech that shattered my nerves before our drive even began.. and Luke had to reassure me repeatedly that the rear end of my car wouldn’t suddenly just fall off. (I also used to feverishly imagine that the wings of planes would just fall off midair, without provocation… so my lack of trust in machines is apparently a pattern I need to tell my therapist about.)
As we eased into peak traffic, we sadly watched our ETA hit 8:30…8:40… 9… then 9:20. A brief rest stop brought us to 10:05pm. Side note: what law of physics determines that even the shortest of rest stops adds at least 30 minutes to a trip?!
I felt a little guilty as we texted our ETA updates to our host for the evening, Janis. I’d always just assumed you could just post up a tent in The Great Outdoors and that would be camping, but Luke made a good point that it’s probably not safe, so we’ve booked our camping sites for our trip through a site called Hipcamp. I suppose you could call it an Airbnb for camping sites. These are actually a ton of lovely, private sites listed by hosts who want to offer their land for camping. You can sort by a bunch of different filters, including RV parking sites vs Tent-camping, Pet-friendly, Glamping, and more. Some places offer the full hook-up — electric, wifi, toilet, and shower… while others only include a post in the sand. We’ve booked a mix of both, so I’m excited to see how far our planning has taken us. For this first camping experience, our host had given us instructions to meet her so that she could direct us to our parking and camping spot.
We eased into our campground several hours past our planned arrival time after 10:30 and tiredly introduced ourselves to Janis, who—bless her heart— was waiting for us in the dark with a flashlight to direct us to our site.
We began quickly unpacking the bare minimum to get our shelter set up — we had our cots, sleeping pads, sleeping bags, water bottles, a fan, and our good old 6 person tent.
(6 people, you say? Yes. When bougie camping you have to multiply the total occupants by 2, to account for all the crap they have.)
I desperately wanted a shower and a change of clothes, but realized they were deep in the bowels of the car, far deeper than I was willing to dig that night.
A long, leggy human emerged suddenly from the darkness, startling us as her platform shoes crunched against the gravel. She was dressed up in 70s glam: floral miniskirt and all. In her left hand she grasped a doll.
“I’m staying in the shed,” she said by way of introduction. We stared at her blankly for a moment, bemused. “I just saw the Barbie movie,” she gushed, “10/10. Have a good night!” She went into the old building next to our car and shut the door.
If there was ever any doubt that we were glamping, I think we about settled that.