Travel Tip: Watch for bears.

At Shenandoah National Park, there are pictures of bears and warnings about bears and information about how to keep your food away from bears. These bits of information are everywhere.

Somehow, I still didn’t expect to actually see a black bear. Kristina and I were on the Ancient Volcano Ranger led hike (which I highly recommend!), when right near the trail is a juvenile black bear! Everyone on the hike stopped and watched the bear.

Not my picture, but this one was cuter.

The bear was just chilling and doing bear stuff when he decided we were too close to his territory and started to charge us! Luckily Superhero/Park Ranger Bob was there. He did the professional, park ranger thing, and stepped forward, clapped really loudly, and yelled at the bear.

The bear turned around and walked away. He did not run away, or even go very far. This bear had some attitude. He just turned around and moved to a distance he deemed safe. And stared at us until we left.

All of the deer got this close

Shenandoah is absolutely beautiful though. The hiking trails were great! There were several to choose from—short hikes, long hikes, ranger led, or self-directed. And the campgrounds were really nice. There were hot showers and washing machines (quarter operated) at the front of the park and bathrooms and water faucets spread throughout the campgrounds.

We managed to camp next to the coolest people, too. A family from Berlin was camping right across from us. They needed a bottle opener. Kristina happened to have one on her pocket knife. They were incredibly thankful, so they invited us over to roast marshmallows! We had the greatest time. They had never visited Arkansas, so they were curious about our culture. We had never been to Germany, so we were curious about theirs.

We also met a hiker named Muddy Paws! She saw my bumper stickers (if you don’t know, they’re pretty liberal) and thought we seemed like we’d be cool. She works for the Department of Energy. She likes to hike 15+ miles a day because it’s less stressful than her job. There’s a whole hiker subculture built on trust-they’ll share campsites with people they just met and only know by their trail names. It was interesting for sure.

Shameless hiking selfies.

I guess that’s something cool about camping. You can meet bears and cool people in the same day.

Travel Tip: Always bring aluminum foil.

We thought we were sooo smart and prepared, bringing my granpa’s old camping stove.

We would’ve been smarter and more prepared if we had stopped to figure out if it worked, first.

As is, we were in the woods, trying to get this stove to start around lunch time. We were hungry and got tired of fooling with it, so we just went up to the Big Meadows Wayside to get lunch. I ordered a veggie burger and a side salad. It was excellent! Much better than fighting with a stove or trying to start a fire.

Unfortunately, dinner time rolled around and we still didn’t have a working stove. Kristina started building a fire and I started thinking of back up plans.

I struggled to remember the various non-stove recipes I’d seen on Pinterest (there was no cell service, so there was no quick Google-ing). I finally recalled a tutorial on cooking in foil packets that I’d seen (it was this one). 

Luckily, right before we left, I had thrown aluminum foil in the car. I grabbed that and then went through the cooler and found salsa, black beans, and smoked sausage. We cut up a bit of onion and threw it in foil, then tossed it on the fire. When we (carefully) pulled it off the fire, we sprinkled some cheese on top. Honestly? It wasn’t bad.  It was definitely better than going hungry or buying more expensive food from the wayside.

Thank God for Pinterest.

Travel Writing

I haven't used this blog since I was about 16 (I've been blogging over at Help Ever, Hurt Never), but I plan to use it for my travel writing experiment this summer.

I'm a professional writing major. UCA has offered a travel writing seminar in the past, but hasn't listed it for the upcoming year. I've taken matters into my own hands and applied for a Travel Abroad Grant from the Norbert O. Schedler Honors College. Kristina and I will be traveling for about three weeks, stopping in five different places. We'll be camping some times and staying in hostels others. 

Two young women traveling the East coast alone for a month out of the summer? I imagine we'll have some stories. Even better, I'm a bit prissy about my sleeping arrangements and haven't been camping since I was about 10 and in Girl Scouts. And did I mention I'm really in to clean eating?

While researching our destinations for the trip, I realized it's kind of hard to find relatively easy, clean eating recipes that can be done over a campfire. Even harder? Planning yoga that I can do in a hostel.

My goal for this blog is that I'll show other students that great trips can be pulled off for relatively low cost if you put a little work into it! The hostels? They're about $30 a night, per person, if you hunt out the low cost establishment. How clean/comfortable are they? I'll let you know!