Last week, Suzanne and I went camping. I brought my computer, but I barely used it — I didn’t even write morning words most days, which is something I’ve done every day for years now — and I never connected it to the internet. It was so relaxing. An escape from the news, even if only for a few days.

Our first campground, Junction City, is only a couple hours away from Arcata. Suzanne had caught my cold, so after a reasonably relaxed morning of loading up, we agreed to drive for a while, then stop for lunch and consider our options from there. She was sure she’d be fine to keep driving for a few more hours; I, having just spent several days with presumably the same germs, thought she probably ought to be resting instead. By the time we made it to Junction City, the germs were winning so we snagged two sites side-by-side and made it a stop for the night.

The campground has twenty-two spots, I think, and definitely the nicest ones – in terms of privacy & aesthetics — were the higher numbers, but those were also deeper in the trees and seriously buggy. The campground hosts (very friendly and helpful) warned us about the bugs before we picked our spots, so we walked the dogs around the campground before deciding and then chose two spots that were more exposed, but much less buggy. The highway – 299 – was within view from our spots and definitely within hearing, but apart from that, the spots were nice. Very spacious, great trees.

Zelda, as always, let me know at about 3AM that she was ready for a walk. Sigh. But the night sky was fantastic. Beautiful and clear, with no moon, the kind of night where so many stars are visible that it’s impossible not to feel like an infinitesimal speck in the immensity of the universe. Well worth getting up at 3AM.

The next day was mostly a driving day. We stopped at the Veterans Living Memorial Sculpture Garden outside of Weed for lunch and did not do nearly a good enough job of exploring. Zelda was doing the slow-mo, elderly dog walk and Suzanne should have been in bed with some chicken soup and bad television, so we saw the Memorial Wall, which is basically in the parking lot, and I managed to walk to the nearest sculpture, just to prove that there really were sculptures out there, but it was very low-key touristing.

After lunch, we kept driving. Our destination was Indian Well Campground at the Lava Beds National Monument. Spoiler: we made it there with no trouble. But for some reason this blog post has taken me forever to write, perhaps because I’ve spent so long playing with the images, so I think I’ll write about Lava Beds tomorrow. It was excellent, so there’s lots to say and many pictures to play with!