Camping in the Berkshires – Night 1
My friends are dropping like flies. Everybody is pregnant. I mean everybody. So much so that the Midwich Cuckoos have been going through my mind, so coordinated were the pregnancies. Not that I am unhappy to see little versions of my friends running around, but I must say there are a few things that I feel the need to do with my friends before the gestation period is over.
And one of those things is camping. As one of us is due in June, we were running out of time, but we scheduled this past weekend as one we could all fit in. When Karen emailed and said she would be doing a photoshoot over the same period, I instructed her that she would have to come too. Happily she was up for it.
Zipcar as our carriage, we set off for one night of camping and one night of B&B in the Berkshires. We Zipcared it fairly quickly through Massachusetts (I disagree with Woody Allen, Massachusetts is much harder to spell than Connecticut) and found ourselves in Northampton. Right during Northampton gay pride festival. The state of MA (I got bored of spelling it) was obviously trying to ingratiate itself with us liberal New Yorkers. Or something.
We fought our way through the lines at Sparky's on Main St in Northampton, and settled down with hotdogs, sublime fries, just-tart-enough strawberry lemonade and knee-quivering blueberry milkshakes. T tried to resist the milkshakes but ran back in after we had left to partake in some cheek-hollowing goodness.
On the way back to the car, S's nose started sniffing and she shouted out "bread!" Sure enough, we were passing a tiny little hidden bakery, the smell its only signage. At the hub of the Hungry Ghost is a wood burning oven out of which comes loaves and loaves of delicious smelling bread.
We all stood there in awe, hands reaching for our wallets. We bought two loaves of bread (fennel semolina and a dark rye) for our night in the wilderness. Clutching the warm loaves (they were so fresh that they were still warm when we came to eat them a few hours later) we headed over to the campsite. Which is off a random road, then down a bumpy dirt path, past a strange sign that read "camping*swimming*fun". The word "picnics" had been crossed out and fun had replaced it. Thank God they did that, or we would have been stuck with a picnic and no fun.
We came at the right time – Berkshire Camping must be a bloody nightmare in the summertime. We judged this by the aerosol cans, batteries and metal that were left, burned out, in the fire pits. They had been there all winter. So we cleaned out the toxic material and started ourselves a huge perfect-for-witches fire (we were in Massachusetts after all). After being treated extremely rudely by the campground's owner, we were then left completely on our own, just us, our fire, our Muji tent and the beavers.
We had stopped off in a supermarket on the way (which was actually very difficult to find, we had to drive for about 30 miles to find somewhere that sold food that wasn't Spam) we had provisions to make some vegetable kebabs and baked potatoes, which we wrapped in foil and threw straight into the hearth. While the kebabs cooked in the flames we dug into our spectacular bread. I had also brought with me a frozen pork tenderloin (there was no way we were buying meat from the Stop 'n' Shop) and it was perfectly thawed by the time we were ready to eat (see image above). It went straight onto the flames and was charred and smokey and went amazingly well with the fennel semolina bread. We did try some fancy s'mores after all this food – though by this time I think beer and wine was all we needed to consume – but these got quickly laid to the wayside in favor of the good ol' roasted marshmallow.
We went to sleep with pregnant S on a sinking aerobed in her tent and me, M and K listening to the peepers , snuggled down in our sleeping bags. Apparently it went down near 0°C that night. No matter. We stank of smoke, had leaves in our hair, and we slept like...well, people sleeping outside on the hard ground, of course. That's what we were there for afterall.
