The past weekend a few of my good friends and I went up to Manning Park for an overnight camping trip. This was the first time the 4 of us have actually gone anywhere together and we’ve been friends for the last 15 years. For one of my friends this was his first camping trip ever. We left Saturday afternoon as the camp grounds was roughly 2.5 hours away from Vancouver. Originally there had been a campfire ban but we were lucky it had rained quite a bit the week before and the ban was lifted.
We arrived at the campsite around dinner time so we quickly set up our tents and started building the campfire. I had brought my propane grill as well to cook most of the food except for the salmon, which we placed onto the fire pit.
We had brought our own firewood with us but our ax was a bit small and made it difficult to chop up some of the wood for kindling. One of our friend decided to try and “smash” the piece of log against some rocks in hopes of it splitting apart, sadly it was a failed attempt. We just ended up using pine cones and tree bark to keep the fire going so that we could roast our over sized marshmallows.
For most of the evening we just sat around the campfire roasting marshmallows, chatting, and waiting for the stars to come out. Eventually it became a bit too chilly so we decided to call it a night. Our campsite was right next to a river so the temperature actually became quite frigid in the evening and despite having sleeping bags all of us were freezing. We all arose fairly early in the morning, packed up and headed home. It was a short camping trip but it was still pleasant to get away from the city…even for just a night.