Camping in Idyllwild

Sit down and prepare yourself for another epic adventure of Amanda and Marissa’s adventures of camping in Idyllwild.

And the story of how the squirrel stole my brownies. At least they weren’t special brownies…ha ha…ha…..

Sometimes you just need to take a spontaneous camping trip to the treeeeees. And by spontaneous, I mean, planning it about a week in advance and making Excel spreadsheets of camping gear and cuisine. Rack of lamb anyone?

However, I tried to bring rack of lamb but Amanda told me to make this trip easy/ cheap. So brats and burgers it is. Sad. AND ONE KIND OF CHEESE. I was shooketh. I’m like, wtf we need at least ONE soft cheese and ONE hard cheese. I need choices!!!

Off to the Campgrounds

We packed up my CRV to spend the weekend in camping in Idyllwild, CA, laying in hammocks, eating good food, and testing out our brand new tent and air mattress (thanks dad). Our last air mattress had a hole in it and our old tent was a two person. I like my sister (she has her pros and cons), and sharing such a small, teeny tent was cozy, yes, but a bit annoying. Now we got that queen air mattress and FIVE person tent. We don’t have enough friends to fill a 5 person tent but whatever, at least I can stand to pull up my pants.

I usually drive out to our destination and Amanda drives back. It’s super annoying cause I get all that stupid Friday traffic and Amanda gets that smooth ass drive back on Sunday. Siri is having me getting off and on the freeways, taking me through neighborhoods and side streets and shit. At one point we were driving through a neighborhood in Corona and we were so deep into this neighborhood Amanda pulled up her Zillow up so we could compare housing prices of one side of the neighborhood to the other! Like, I get we are avoiding traffic, but now I’m stuck in traffic cause a middle school just got out and their are soccer moms everywhere. Da fuck. Why doesn’t Amanda drive first? CaUsE sHe Is WoRkInG.

Every single time we go camping, we set up in the dark. Every time? Yes every time! We usually get stuck in a fork ton of traffic or in the winter, the sun sets at like 5pm. We arrived at the campsite in DAY LIGHT for the first time ever. And we were a bit thrown off. Wonder what it would be like to set up in daylight? And eat dinner at a normal time?

Camping Air Mattress Lesson 101

Well.

For as organized and prepared as we are, (see my Excel sheet reference above) we done messed up.

Camping tip numero uno: If you get a new air mattress, double check that it doesn’t need to be PLUGGED INTO A WALL TO INFLATE. You know what they don’t have in the friggin forest? WALLS.

Whatevs. We will just drive to one of the hardware stores we passed in the little town for a converter that plugs into the car. Cool cool.

However the stores closed at 5 and it’s 5:30. Cool cool cool cool. Plan B.

We walk into a liquor store and probably the nicest person I have ever met is working there. We tell him our issue and thought maybeeeeee he might have something. He starts rummaging through his own stuff trying to find something that would help. He asks us to bring in the air mattress, telling us that we could blow it up there (lol). And we are like errrrr in a liquor store? He said that there is an outdoor outlet, around the back of the store, we could plug into and he would let us borrow his rope, tie the mattress to our car, and drive back to the campsite. See, I told you NICEST man.

Right then and there Amanda had a brilliant idea, (she gets them every once and awhile), the bathrooms at the campsite usually have outlets!! SO SMART. We’ve seen people charging their phones in bathrooms every time we camp! HOORAH. We thank the nice man endlessly for his generosity and tell him that he miiiiiiight see us again if plan B fails.

So plan B failed.

We tried every bathroom, inside and outside, at this campground. I even tried to get into the front office. We unpack the entire car, put down the seats and were like ok, back to the liquor store. Grabbed our own rope, so we didn’t have to borrow this man’s. See? I told you we come prepared…

I back in around the liquor store, plug in the mattress and watch it inflate in my truck. So embarrassing. But hey, at least we found a plug. We were about to be on the floor of our five person tent.

I thought it would be way harder to get out of the car but I think God knew we had enough struggles for the day. It was 8pm by now, the sun had set and ya girl was hungry. We set up IN THE DARK and put the brats on the campfire. Nothing like wine, wieners and sitting by the campfire to round out the day.

Amanda poured me a cup of wine, put it in the cup holder in my chair, I walk out of the tent, grab my chair to shake off the dust/dirt, and end up throwing my whole cup of wine on myself. Cool. Cool…cool…now I was cold and wet. I was very upset. I splurged and got an $8 bottle at Trader Joe’s!!! Now I’m wearing it.

Amanda got plastered.

She managed to roll off the bed while trying to get into the bed. Yes the air mattress was only like 75% full but she was also drruuuUUUUnnnnkkkk. ‘Twas funny.

It was freezing. The first night always is. It takes my body 12-24 hours to reach a steady, comfortable temperature of borderline hypothermia. By the second night, I’m too numb to care. But that first night, I question EVERYTHING. WHY did we come and SLEEP outside in 38 degree weather. I have my beanie pulled down below my nose, gloves, four layers of jackets/ long sleeves, thermal underwear and two hand warmers on each butt cheek. Still cold. Twas a rough start to our camping in Idyllwild adventure.

Camping Day 2

The next morn, we woke up, still cold and got a fire started. 75 mins later we had a nice fire going and we were ready for some brecky.

I wandered off down to the river to see where my dreams extend.

I wish I would have brought my gold pan! Oh well, missed opportunity.

This babbling brook was, well, babbling. It’s about 20ish feet from our tent so we could hear it at night. So peaceful.

We were slowly starting to defrost, ate our breakfast and then decided to head back into town in search of a converter for our air mattress. I was already mentally prepared to not to find anything, which is fine, I could survive another night. We went to True Value Hardware and they had NADA, so off to the small, local hardware store. Andddd success! HELL YA.

Off to Town

The town of Idyllwild is so cute and quaint.

Reminded me of Truckee, CA. Little shops everywhere. It seemed like every store was one of those metaphysical, earthy stores. Not kidding, we went into about eight identical stores. Idk how they stay in business. How many different stores filled with dream catchers and incense in one tiny town do you need?

They did only have ONE ice cream and jerky store.

And they had a tea place!!! You know I looooooove tea. Do I need more tea? Negative. Did I buy more anyways? YUP.

After a brief photoshoot we headed back to camp with our goodies to prepare a nice camp charcuterie and play a few rounds of cards.

Once we were back at camp I asked Amanda if we could take a little stroll to the waterfall before we play games. I was still in photoshoot mode.

My Beloved Brownies

This is where the afternoon decided to take a turn and nature decided to show us who was boss. We get back to the campsite and I notice one of the bags had been knocked over. About 5 feet from the table, on the ground… MY BROWNIES! Fear sits in. Fuck. I grab the baggie – it was chewed through and the brownies are missing.

Those little fuckwads. Yes, I am aware we shouldn’t have left the bag out. And we should have known better blah blah blah. But we didn’t and now we have a stoned AF squirrel on our hands… somewhere.

After (sadly) throwing away my brownies and laughing at, OF COURSE, out of all the snacks in the bag that mofo takes the brownies, we proceeded back on schedule to our charcuterie and games.

Halfway through our game, Amanda spots something teal blue off in the distance, down by the creek. Is that? Wait, no. Is that our jar of peanut butter?!??!!?!? THIS BITCH ASS SQUIRREL BETTA BE PLAYIN. First the brownies NOW the peanut butter.

YOU SEEIN THIS???

I can not believe in that short amount of time a squirrel, maybe two, managed to eat some brownies and run away with the peanut butter. At least this squirrel was straight chillin now. I bet it knew what it was doing. Respect.

Whatevs. The show must go on. We had hamburgers for dinner and well, no dessert. But we had a wholllleeeeee other bottle of wineeeeee. Bitch ass squirrel left that! Honestly, that squirrel is probs dead. Or still on another planet.

But hey, at least we got the air mattress blown up to it’s full potential. Somehow I managed to roll off of it this night. It was also still cold. We assumed the position of hat-over-eyes-hand-warmers-on-butt-cheeks. For a weekend that was supposed to be full of rest, I could not for the love of god fall asleep.

Camping Day 3

The next morn we pretty much just ate, packed up, and left our campsite. We wanted to hit the poppy super bloom near Lake Elsinore on the way home. You know? The one allllllll over Instagram if you live in Southern California. We drove past it on the way up and I asked Amanda if we could puhhhhlease pull over and she was like, “We WiLl HiT iT oN tHe WaY bAcK.” So I was ready to have another photoshoot. I mean, I hadn’t showered in a few days and my hair had been permanently in a beanie. Pretty sure I was in the same bra too.

Anyway, we are almost there and we hit MAJOR traffic. We see construction signs that say “poppy viewing, take this street” “these streets are closed”. I’m like oh lawd. I thought we could just get off the freeway, park along the road, take some pics, hop back on the freeway la-ti-da on our way.

You had to park in this “lot” and then they had shuttles that would take you to the poppy fields. However, we were already off the freeway, in a huge line, when they told us that. By this point I was like, I look like I smell and I don’t care that much. Take me home. As a result, while we sat in stopped traffic, I took pictures out the window of the car lolollooll.

In conclusion, I didn’t get me frolicking though the flowers but if we are being honest, it was probably for the best cause we looked haggard. Not Hagrid. Well we kinda looked like him.

And that concludes our camping in Idyllwild trip. It was Idyll and it was Wild. I can’t wait to see where we camp next. I hope its warm. And I’m keeping the brownies in the car.

-Marissa and the bitch ass squirrel

For more information on the campsite we stayed check it out here. Check out my other camping diary from the Grand Canyon HERE.