Most of my regular readers know that Mr. Pete and I just don’t get away that much. Not enough time and not enough money are the usual reasons for forgoing a luxurious one week of away time. This time we were able to string together 4 1/2 days- which is pretty good for us. So we wanted to make the most of each day.
Before we left for our upper Michigan trip, I found a campground online that seemed perfect i.e. he had hot showers and flushing toilets! That in my book makes for a great campsite! But this one also had a lot of amenities for sportsmen, fishermen and hunting. It sounded pretty family friendly to me.
When we arrived at our site I was not disappointed. It was beautiful and right on the river too!
It was beautiful, clean and perfect. There were a group of college aged boys in the site next to us. They seemed friendly enough and I didn’t anticipate a problem, especially since signs were posted on the site that quiet was to be observed between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.
I guess they missed that memo. More and more kids started arriving at the camp and by night time I’m guessing that maybe there were as many as 20 people on their site, which had also become decidedly co-ed! As all of us started dozing off in our tent around 11:00 we were roused to the sounds of the group singing happy birthday to one of their members Nate – which I’m guessing happened at midnight. After that it was awful. F-bombs were dropped with regularity, screaming, laughter, Nate was also apparently getting “birthday sex” and loud voices took over our campsite. Judging from the beer cans on the ground the next day, there was a lot of drinking too. By 2 a.m. Mr. Pete and I had both had it. Sam had a headache and found refuge by going out to the van to sleep. He was smart. Apparently it was more sound proof than our tent was.
I got out of the tent and tapped one of the young men on the shoulder. I explained that I had minor children in the tent and that none of us were getting any sleep and asked if they could PLEASE just keep it down. This guy (holding two beers in his arm and trying hard just to stand and focus at the same time) apologized and then disappeared (fell) into the tent.
But the volume kept up for a while longer. Around 3 a.m. I heard the young man I had talked to say, “Remember that other old lady came over and asked us to keep it down too.”
Great. Insult to injury as Mr. Pete chuckled something about me being the other old lady – which made me wonder about who the first old lady was?
Turns out the “other old lady” was the camp owner who said she came down about 1 a.m. to ask them to quiet down. She said she didn’t hear any bad language though and it appears she missed out on the birthday sex too. When we found out that group was staying for a second night we asked for and got a refund. We pulled up our tent and left.
Our next campsite didn’t have a shower or a flush toilet, although I thought they did a pretty good job of keeping the odor down on the pit toilet. But it was really quiet at 10 p.m. and it remained that way until sun up, and even after that people seemed respectful of everyone’s space.
Aside from sheltering my kids from this kind of raunchiness, I had some other concerns about this campsite and I wouldn’t be surprised to read about something going wrong out there sometime if this is a norm for the weekend. All that alcohol so close to a river with a decent current seems to be a good recipe for an accidental drowning. Scantily clad girls with lots of young men and beer sounds like a bad place for a potential rape sometime. I guess nothing happened the second night though, or at least I didn’t read hear about it before we left upper Michigan.
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