I suppose I should comment a bit more on the camping trip, as generally the comment "worst trip ever" begs for some exposition. We had a hard time finding any sort of open campground in Northern Idaho, so we made a reservation for a tent site at the Wolf Lodge Campground and headed out on our vacation. The drive up was quite nice, and we stopped in Moscow for a while to see how much it's changed since we lived up there. I was sad to see that the comic shop and the local Hobbytown were both closed down. They probably went bankrupt after I moved away and took a good portion of their incomes with me.

After a perilous journey down a trail recommended by Google Maps we arrived on a road about ten feet from the Interstate. The campground was just off this road and it was crowded with RVs and an unruly mob of noisy children. The lady in the office gave us a map to our "campsite" and we drove down to see that the occupants on either side of our assigned site were crowded so far into our site that our tent wouldn't even fit there. We went back to the office and asked for another site. After a lot of persuading the lady finally gave us a different spot, which had someone's car parked on it. We angrily set up our tent on the tiny patch of lawn and went out to find some food. When we got back we went to sleep listening to the soothing sounds of the Interstate and the drunk people whose campsite was approximately 15 inches from our own.

In the morning we woke up and had breakfast, which was certainly flavorful, just not in a very good way. Apparently our camp stove has only two settings, OFF and NUCLEAR REACTOR.

We had plans to go fishing at a lake that looked fairly secluded on the map, so we threw some stuff in the car and headed out. We got stuck in the traffic jam of people lined up to go to the Silverwood theme park, but eventually got to the lake. The guy on the dock gave up on his fishing trip just as we drove up, and we didn't get so much as a nibble for the brief period of time that we fished. About an hour into it a family with a few dogs showed up and most of them started jumping around in the water which pretty much ruled out fishing. Some other guy showed up and started telling us stories about when he was 14 and caught a big fish in some other part of the state. We finally left and decided that there wasn't much going right in this trip, so maybe we'd go back to the tent parking lot and regroup. Eventually we decided to cut the trip off early and head home, with the stipulation that we would still act as though we were on vacation for the rest of the weekend. The drive back home was nice, even though we drove in the middle of the night and missed out on the scenery.

When we woke up we went out to pick up the dogs from the kennel and watched a movie together. Today we had the veterinarian experience, and after paying them $200 and being used as a doggie toilet I was in a foul mood. We had planned on going to Hobbytown today so I could pick up some more Space Marines, but I was too grouchy to make the trip and took a nap while my wife knitted. We went to dinner with my sister and her husband, and I admit that I was not very sociable.

I guess looking at it from the outside it may not appear to be an extremely bad trip, but with the anticipation going into the trip and frustration of the individual events building on each other, there wasn't a lot of relaxing and recharging going on.