Donner Expedition - Chapter 6

After hearing that we had potentially been chased by a criminal, we were more scared than ever. But, the policeman assured us that the man did not have a white SUV of any kind, and that he would know if the guy had gone to the campground because the man's tracking device would have alerted the police. Next he explained a few facts about fires to us. Apparently a fire that has been completely doused can come back. I guess firefighters experience that all the time. Who knew?

Then the policeman offered to go back to the campground with us so we could get our stuff. Of course we would not have gone back in the dark alone (who cares what we had left there when our lives were in danger?), but we felt fine about going back with him. He also wanted to see if there were any signs of our "visitor."

When we got there, we found everthing exactly as we had left it. The dishes we had cooked with were still on the picnic table. Our tent was zipped, and nothing had been moved. And there were no footprints anywhere in the muddy ground. We now fully understood just how much of the experience had been in our imaginations. And it all started because of the fire (which had completely died down at this point). My uncle laughed at us, and then he asked the policeman to turn on his siren as he left! Not funny!

So, the moral of the story is this: Don't do something if you are clueless about it. We were clueless about camping and failed to follow the advice we had received (especially "camp near a family"). The result was disaster. We were able to still have somewhat of a camping experience by using someone's yard, but that's not exactly what we had set out to do.

In the end, we did not have a sucessful trip by which we proved to our guy friends how much we could do. But we did have lots of memories and one heck of a story.