Camping @ Dillon Lake - Sunday Night & Monday

Sunday night was significantly better thanks to Don, the campground manager, (who Mike referred to as The Don), since he used his golf-cart enforced authority to silence the unruly members of the neighborhood. The night was also about 10 degrees warmer (my reading was 44*F) and between my properly patched Thermarest, Kim's new beanie, and our favorable temperatures, our night was much more comfortable. We woke up in the middle of the night to Bridget growling, and we heard some rustling around outside the tent, but I couldn't see anything out of the little plastic windows in our rainfly. I stayed up a bit after Bridget stopped growling, listening for anything else, but I didn't hear anything else.

That brings us to today. We looked for tracks first thing in the morning, but didn't see anything identifiable in the hard dirt. After Kim changed into some good hiking clothes, we left for a bright-and-early hike at about 6 am. There was a trailhead located at the entrance to our campground, and we walked up the road to check it out. It ended up being a pretty good trail, easy bordering on moderate, and we had a good time warming up for the day. We lost the trail toward the top, and decided to take a little off-shoot that looked like it went down the hill. That ended up dead-ending in some rocks, but I went ahead and picked out a precarious but doable path that led us back up to the trail. I called Bridget up, and of course she found an easy little path just to the side that bypassed all the junk I had tiptoed through, and she and Kim passed in 30 seconds what I had taken several minutes to cross. Hmph.

After we got back, we had a quick breakfast and packed everything back into the car, and we got rolling a little bit after 9. The drive was pleasant and went pretty quick, but we counted 17 State Troopers that were waiting for unsuspecting Memorial Day motorists to zoom by them on the steep downgrades. We lucked out and got by without any tickets or warnings, but I'll have to remember that for next time we are coming down I-70, especially on a popular weekend like this one.

Overall, it was a good trip. There wasn't too much traffic considering the reputation of Memorial Day weekend, and Kim and I both felt it would be a worthwhile campground to visit again. However, after the screeching children and yodeling country singers, we are going to be that much happier with the isolation that comes with backpacking.