West Virginia Camping Trip 2008

No descriptions necessary for pictures in most cases, just a little background....

Fiance and I took a week and went to West Virginia. What is in West Virginia you ask? Nothing. Why did we go? Because "nothing" is in West Virginia :D

We packed up the cooler and headed out. The first two nights we spent in a crappy campground, due to that's where we spent the day white water rafting (what a blast!)...the rest, we spent at a "unique" campground.

The campground is in the Laurel Fork Wilderness area. It is basically a camping "oasis" in the middle of a mountain valley....about 20 miles (depending on which way you come in) of rough (for a mustang), dirt, single-lane, 10-15mph road to get to it....so about an hour drive from the nearest paved road, and about 1.5 hours to the nearest "Store" of any kind. You basically drive for an hour into the woods, then come to a clearing, with nice, clean campsites....you put your 8$ a night in the locked slot....and setup. The only amenities are an (actually REALLY clean) outhouse...no showers, electric, cell phone reception for that matter. there are 15 total sites at the campground and we.....were the only ones the whole rest of the week. Talk about peaceful. We camped right on a crystal clear brook/stream (that served as our amenities).

Every night we looked forward to a bottle of wine, some cooking, and sitting by the fire....after that, we looked forward to breakfast!



Here are some pictures...Nothing special, but something about cooking in the middle of nowhere, with no access to the store, with limited supplies, etc. makes it taste really really good.

On our way up we pulled into this gas station, unfortunately it was like 10:30am and nothing was ready, but it smelled amazing....





Disclaimer: No, I'm not hardcore enough (on this trip) to load a charcoal grill up in a 135k mile on the odo 6cyl mustang, nor was I lugging cast iron or the like. If ya wanna see that kinda hardcore, I took a motorcycle trip to the "real" wilderness up to Goose Bay Labrador (google it) and was a few hundred miles from civilization at some points.....and all i had was that gigastove and some titanium campware!











Guess who is about to go take a drink?



yep, Darling fiance.(you can almost see her feet in the second picture)

after that, she needed more than just wine....something more classy..









Ahh, nice and "full"...

...until breakfast...





even the animals like my cooking..



ok, that was the "fancy" campsite...you know the one with showers....and people....ick...now we are off to the "real" campsite.

imagine this place, being over an hour away from the nearest paved road....all to yourself.







I tought how to make the perfect s'more....She thought that there were no "tricks" to it...she quickly learned...and savored the perfect s'more. Maybe I'll post in the recipe section.. haha.

breakfast..again?









Ever try to regulate heat/fry an egg with one of those burners? geeesh!! I'm a pro now!



We skipped dinner that night, and just went right for smore s'mores and some jiffy pop over the fire...

breakfast.....again?



I was going to whip up a "camping eggs benedict" but didn't have any lemons or cayenne pepper to attemp a camping/double boiler hollandaise...haha.



She uses that 6.99 santoku for for EVERYTHING.

driving to the campsite days earlier (trust me once you make that 20 mile, 10-15mph drive in...you don't wanna leave), we saw these guys....



and I suddenly craved an angus steak....so 1 day we made the ~3 hour round trip to get some steaks, (and we needed to reload on firewood, a mustang can only carry so much!)

We saved them for our last night there.....and had a "last night feast"




Most expensive bottle of wine at the only liqour store within 1.5 hours..









No fancy pan sauce here....(altough, I thought about it, but decided pan searing on a non-stick was not a good idea)



just a knob of butter.



We had another friend for dinner too...



He was eating all of the crabapples that the squirels were knocking down (all. through. the. night.)



Thanks for letting us share!

Again, nothing special, but boy was it good!! simple and good.

for tons more pictures of our entire trip, some more food pictures....etc...
go to
My SmugMug Album