I did end up catching the bug, so I’m keeping it low key this weekend while Ben is working. I have my cup of tea, my music playing on my phone, and it is a beautiful day out today!

I was recalling a story the other day and thought that I would share 🙂

Last spring, a Saturday night, no plans, nestled in our tiny apartment in Eastern Washington.

I had fallen asleep early that night for whatever the reason, and Ben may have been gaming on the computer. It was around 11 PM that I woke up, fully rested and not ready to go back to sleep… but what to do at that hour? Ben was still up and wasn’t ready to go to sleep yet either.

He mentioned it would’ve been cool if we thought to head up the the Meadows to camp for the night.  – – The Meadows (not sure if that’s just what everyone calls it or its actual name) is this place in Washington, about an hour drive north of us, that is up in the mountains a bit and is a place for open camping, horseback riding, off road vehicles etc. It is beyond beautiful. Just set off a dirt road high up there, and people mostly just seem to know about it by word of mouth. VERY popular place none the less, especially during Labor day and Memorial day for those campers!

I really just fell in love with the Northwest and the mountains in Washington and northern Idaho the moment I landed there. Something about those evergreens that feels like home to me —  The smells of the trees and the woods always reminds me of time spent in the U.P. in my youth 🙂

So ANYWAYS – It is 11 at night, and we decided it wasn’t to late to go for a night of camping, and headed off to the Meadows for a night!

Ben had an 1980 something Volkswagen Rabbit pickup truck at the time (funnest little truck) so we loaded it up with an air mattress, cooler full of whatever we had in the fridge, all of our blankets and headed off.

It took us about an hour to get up to the dirt road that led into the meadows.. if you do a google search of that specific vehicle, you can see the headlights aren’t much to talk about, and I had to just trust that Ben knew where he was headed. We could faintly make out other campers set up on our way up the road, but they were few and far between. . . probably because it was about 50 degrees outside!

Eventually we made it up and found an open clearing we could drive into and set up shop. All that I could make out was that we were next to a really big tree a few feet away. So anyways, we pumped up the air mattress and loaded it all into the bed of the truck and had our bed!

JUST gonna throw this out there.. it was NOT comfortable… best get some foam pads instead for you star gazing lovers out there! The bed of the truck was skinny so of course a queen size air bed isn’t going to fit all the way. I figure the thick foam bed pads will shape better and a couple stacked could be quite comfy!

We ate our snacks and had a little campfire (about 2 AM at this point) and fell asleep under the stars… besides my nose running and being a bit red, it was perfect. Almost.

So I always knew those bar gate things in the ground you drive over in farming areas were to keep the cattle from being able to walk across.. but I never saw the cattle. Just figured it was a precaution. But then I learned around 5 AM what open range really was.

It started off with some quiet mooing in the distance, that would intermittently pick up and get louder and quieter.  Having only a few hours of shut eye, I tried to roll over grunting and groaning over the disturbance, putting one of the pillows over my head.

This continued for a few short minutes until I was jolted upright out of bed from the sound of a cow bellowing a few feet from the end of the bed of the truck… I was in shock looking at her, until I saw the bull who was staring at me a foot from my left side. Then silent panic set in.

I was frantically nudging Ben trying to wake him up, all the while I’m starting to take in actually how many were surrounding us. There was the full herd. All of them… just trying to figure out who the intruders were. It was so comical.. but frightening because the rabbit is  not a tall truck… so the cows were looking over us. Kind of jarring!  Of course they didn’t charge us or anything — even tho that’s all I could picture happening!

They continued on and we decided to pack it up and head home. Probably the shortest camping outing I’ve had but the most exciting!