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- Sep 11, 2002
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My brother got married earlier this year. As his best man, I arranged a bachelor camping party to occur June 4th through 8th with some of his (and my) friends. This is a story about that camping trip (and probably my first story here) - but don't worry there is Busse content.
We set the camping date of June 4th through 8th a couple of months in advance of the event. There is always a danger in doing this as you just don't know if you pick the weekend of unusual hot humid temperatures vs. a cool stretch. Since we were going to be out for 4 nights it was pretty much moot anyways. We arranged a weekend to have the groomsmen there, and then invited others. It turned out to be a small but fun event. Beer, good friends, and Busse knives!
Our destination - the Richard Bong State Recreation Area outside Kenosha WI. To anyone who has driven on I-94 between Milwaukee and Chicago and snickered at the sign, yes it's the "Bong State Recreational" area. It's named after an airfield that was never completed - named after the pilot was America's leading ace during World War II. The project was abandoned three days before concrete was to be poured for a 12,500 ft runway. We decided to camp there as it was a midway point for most of us (one guy was coming from Ann Arbor and I live in Iowa).
We arrived Wednesday and the forecast was for a chance of showers twice over the next couple of days. What a joke!
Three of us arrived and each setup their tents. The three of us go way back to our grade-school days, and in fact we all were in the same Boy Scout troop while growing up so we're old hands at camping.
We had a decent first night. We drank and stayed up late into the night. During this trip I carried 4 different Busse knives - one for each day: Hell Razor, Steel Heart Ergo, CG ASH1, and SJ Tac. My brother has seen my Busse knives (and has scored a couple of Swamp Rats (tan-handled Battle Rat and Howling Rat), but our friend hadn't and was absolutely fascinated with them. I also had along a few Game Wardens and a Boney Active Duty so he had a good taste of medium and small Busse blades. This friend doesn't post here, but has been so infatuated with Busse that he just recently purchased his first Busse - a NMSFNO black/black machined micarta. He's in Hog Heaven!
We spent the first night sitting around the camp fire and talking knives. We called it quits at midnight in anticipation of a couple of days of fun.
Somewhere around 4 AM, I woke up to a powerful lightning storm that was immediately overhead. I did everything I could to make sure that I was on my ground pad and not in contact with the ground so as to ensure not getting any ground-strike shocks; as I hoped that I wasn't under any dead limbs or near a dead tree. As I faded back into sleep, the rain picked up and was pummeling the tent.
Then, at around 7:30 AM I wake up to hear a siren not unlike a police siren. It's pounding rain on my tent and then suddenly the park ranger (as that is who it was) starts making an announcement. I struggle to hear him in the driving rain but only hear "Tornado....find shelter at...repeat there is a torna..". So I start getting dressed as fast as I can, and peer out of my tent to see what is going on outside. It isn't windy out, just torrential rain, and no one else is leaving their tent. I decided to stay put but ready. I must have dozed off because I woke up at 10:30 when my brother was outside my tent and it had stopped raining.
Our campsite was saturated. There were huge puddles of water around our site. Fortunately our dining fly and screen house weren't in a low area, but the entire site was now mud.
So we got up, made breakfast, and went about our day (hiking, messing around with knives, playing cards, and drinking). Sorry, I don't have any knife action pictures other than this one:
Thursday it stayed dry - it was muggy after all that rain. Friday, I got an emergency call from work about a network outage which only I knew how to fix. I got a call from work and fixed the problem, but ended up having to drive to Kenosha to use WiFi to check everything out (I had my laptop in the car). I must have been quite a site - muddy shoes, smelling like campfire, wearing a CG ASH1 while sitting in a Starbucks. Pretty much everyone gave me a wide berth for the duration of time I was there! Take that, beatnik society!
I met up with my brother and friends after I finished with the work emergency at a local grocery store. While we were there the tornado sirens went off as a storm front blew in. It didn't rain while I drove back to our camp ground, but when we arrived it had obviously had rained at our site. The mud, which had dried all day Thurs and Friday, was back.
Later that Friday afternoon, more of our friends arrived and we found a local farm house selling bales of straw for $2. We bought a couple of bales and scattered straw over our campsites so as to have something on top of the mud. We managed to have a good night around the fire.
The next day (Saturday), in the afternoon, it stormed again and this time didn't quit. It rained through out the entire night. We managed to get a fire going (but it took all of our fire-crafting skills) and cooked on it, but otherwise sat in a screen house which we had reinforced with tarp so as to protect us from the rain. Drinking of beer and Crown Royal occurred.
Sunday morning was at the end of the week. I woke up and packed before anyone else in the site did - and so I took a walk around the site. There was a tent in the site next to us, but no car or sign of anyone (they had cooking gear sitting out on the camp table ). The site next to that was even more amusing - it appears that someone was taking down their site when the Saturday storm blew through - their tent was laying on the ground, half disassembled. After I walked completely around the loop, there was 1 pop-up in a site (with no vehicle next to it) and only one other site occupied by 3 tents. Talk about fair weather campers!
So we packed up our wet gear, said our goodbyes, and drove our separate ways (and into yet another rain storm).
When I got home I found out that it had rained so much that the Cedar and Iowa Rivers were swollen from rain fall. Yup, this all happened the week before the flooding occurred in downtown Cedar Rapids and Iowa City (and all along the Mississippi). It was also during this week that a tornado struck a Council Bluffs Boy Scout camp ground and killed a couple of kids. One of the rain storms that hit us dumped 6 inches of rain in Milwaukee.
So we weathered a lot of bad during that week - it was definitely a week to remember.
The highlight for me was my gift to my brother. I gave him my "Embrace the Suck" Satin Jack as a gift from his Best Man. It was meant as a joke for him since he was getting married - but apparently also was a fulfilling prophecy that very well summarized the entire camping weekend experience for that trip!
Hope everyone who bothered reading this enjoyed it as much as I did remembering it.
We set the camping date of June 4th through 8th a couple of months in advance of the event. There is always a danger in doing this as you just don't know if you pick the weekend of unusual hot humid temperatures vs. a cool stretch. Since we were going to be out for 4 nights it was pretty much moot anyways. We arranged a weekend to have the groomsmen there, and then invited others. It turned out to be a small but fun event. Beer, good friends, and Busse knives!
Our destination - the Richard Bong State Recreation Area outside Kenosha WI. To anyone who has driven on I-94 between Milwaukee and Chicago and snickered at the sign, yes it's the "Bong State Recreational" area. It's named after an airfield that was never completed - named after the pilot was America's leading ace during World War II. The project was abandoned three days before concrete was to be poured for a 12,500 ft runway. We decided to camp there as it was a midway point for most of us (one guy was coming from Ann Arbor and I live in Iowa).
We arrived Wednesday and the forecast was for a chance of showers twice over the next couple of days. What a joke!
Three of us arrived and each setup their tents. The three of us go way back to our grade-school days, and in fact we all were in the same Boy Scout troop while growing up so we're old hands at camping.
We had a decent first night. We drank and stayed up late into the night. During this trip I carried 4 different Busse knives - one for each day: Hell Razor, Steel Heart Ergo, CG ASH1, and SJ Tac. My brother has seen my Busse knives (and has scored a couple of Swamp Rats (tan-handled Battle Rat and Howling Rat), but our friend hadn't and was absolutely fascinated with them. I also had along a few Game Wardens and a Boney Active Duty so he had a good taste of medium and small Busse blades. This friend doesn't post here, but has been so infatuated with Busse that he just recently purchased his first Busse - a NMSFNO black/black machined micarta. He's in Hog Heaven!
We spent the first night sitting around the camp fire and talking knives. We called it quits at midnight in anticipation of a couple of days of fun.
Somewhere around 4 AM, I woke up to a powerful lightning storm that was immediately overhead. I did everything I could to make sure that I was on my ground pad and not in contact with the ground so as to ensure not getting any ground-strike shocks; as I hoped that I wasn't under any dead limbs or near a dead tree. As I faded back into sleep, the rain picked up and was pummeling the tent.
Then, at around 7:30 AM I wake up to hear a siren not unlike a police siren. It's pounding rain on my tent and then suddenly the park ranger (as that is who it was) starts making an announcement. I struggle to hear him in the driving rain but only hear "Tornado....find shelter at...repeat there is a torna..". So I start getting dressed as fast as I can, and peer out of my tent to see what is going on outside. It isn't windy out, just torrential rain, and no one else is leaving their tent. I decided to stay put but ready. I must have dozed off because I woke up at 10:30 when my brother was outside my tent and it had stopped raining.
Our campsite was saturated. There were huge puddles of water around our site. Fortunately our dining fly and screen house weren't in a low area, but the entire site was now mud.
So we got up, made breakfast, and went about our day (hiking, messing around with knives, playing cards, and drinking). Sorry, I don't have any knife action pictures other than this one:
Thursday it stayed dry - it was muggy after all that rain. Friday, I got an emergency call from work about a network outage which only I knew how to fix. I got a call from work and fixed the problem, but ended up having to drive to Kenosha to use WiFi to check everything out (I had my laptop in the car). I must have been quite a site - muddy shoes, smelling like campfire, wearing a CG ASH1 while sitting in a Starbucks. Pretty much everyone gave me a wide berth for the duration of time I was there! Take that, beatnik society!
I met up with my brother and friends after I finished with the work emergency at a local grocery store. While we were there the tornado sirens went off as a storm front blew in. It didn't rain while I drove back to our camp ground, but when we arrived it had obviously had rained at our site. The mud, which had dried all day Thurs and Friday, was back.
Later that Friday afternoon, more of our friends arrived and we found a local farm house selling bales of straw for $2. We bought a couple of bales and scattered straw over our campsites so as to have something on top of the mud. We managed to have a good night around the fire.
The next day (Saturday), in the afternoon, it stormed again and this time didn't quit. It rained through out the entire night. We managed to get a fire going (but it took all of our fire-crafting skills) and cooked on it, but otherwise sat in a screen house which we had reinforced with tarp so as to protect us from the rain. Drinking of beer and Crown Royal occurred.
Sunday morning was at the end of the week. I woke up and packed before anyone else in the site did - and so I took a walk around the site. There was a tent in the site next to us, but no car or sign of anyone (they had cooking gear sitting out on the camp table ). The site next to that was even more amusing - it appears that someone was taking down their site when the Saturday storm blew through - their tent was laying on the ground, half disassembled. After I walked completely around the loop, there was 1 pop-up in a site (with no vehicle next to it) and only one other site occupied by 3 tents. Talk about fair weather campers!
So we packed up our wet gear, said our goodbyes, and drove our separate ways (and into yet another rain storm).
When I got home I found out that it had rained so much that the Cedar and Iowa Rivers were swollen from rain fall. Yup, this all happened the week before the flooding occurred in downtown Cedar Rapids and Iowa City (and all along the Mississippi). It was also during this week that a tornado struck a Council Bluffs Boy Scout camp ground and killed a couple of kids. One of the rain storms that hit us dumped 6 inches of rain in Milwaukee.
So we weathered a lot of bad during that week - it was definitely a week to remember.
The highlight for me was my gift to my brother. I gave him my "Embrace the Suck" Satin Jack as a gift from his Best Man. It was meant as a joke for him since he was getting married - but apparently also was a fulfilling prophecy that very well summarized the entire camping weekend experience for that trip!
Hope everyone who bothered reading this enjoyed it as much as I did remembering it.
