Don’t worry, it never really rained. That’s a figure of speech, you know. And when I say that it was a "busy" weekend...I'm lying.
Camping was, as predicted, a good time. In fact, it was such a good time on Friday night that we decided to stay Saturday night as well. I believe that’s human nature. “Wasn’t this a great camping trip?! Nothing went wrong, no rain, no cold, the tent didn’t get overcome by the sea, could anything ruin this perfect trip?! Let’s stay another night and find out!”
Fortunately, nothing did go wrong. The only casualty of the trip was my diet. But I did learn a valuable lesson; if necessary, one can survive on sausages and Corona.
But at the price of gastronomical comfort. It’s a good thing that there was a constant breeze is all I can say about that.
But really, there was no real danger of anything major going wrong. Camping near Malibu isn’t exactly “roughing it.” But it was a heck of a lot more like camping than I had thought. The nice thing about the ocean is that it drowns out the people camping next to you. Not literally, I mean it drowns out their voices. Although I did watch some people chase their tent into the surf. The breeze got a bit too breezy at one point.
The constant fear thought that either the tent would blow into the ocean or the ocean would find its way to the tent makes for some anxious sleeping however. The skinny Park Service kid that checked us into the site told us that we shouldn’t pitch the tent too close to the sea. But we did anyway. Maybe we didn’t trust that a kid who didn’t have common sense enough to eat a taco or something couldn’t possibly gauge the dangers of the briny deep, maybe we were living dangerously. Either way, when we woke up the first morning to discover that sometime during the night the waves were about two and a half feet from the tent door, our bravado ebbed a little. But not enough to move the tent. The damn thing took and hour to put up, I’d be damned if we were going to move it. Besides, we looked real brave having our tent closer to the ocean than anyone else on the entire beach.
Sure, brave. I like to think we looked brave…not stupid. Brave!
Here’s a picture of the tent. I decided not to post pictures of us around the campsite. I took all of the pictures in the morning and let’s just say…we looked like we just slept in a tent. But trust me, that’s our campsite.
We also had the biggest campfire. Don’t believe me? The overpowering stench of campfire on everything we own should sway you. I still have the smell in my nose. After all, we only burned through about 12 bundles of wood. We could have built a cabin with the wood we burned through. Kevin’s girlfriend Leesa likes to have a big fire. I suspect that she was stranded on a desert island when she was younger.
The only stress about this camping trip was that Kevin and I both had auditions to go to. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. Kevin got me the audition and I’m very grateful (I hope to hear from them today, the shoot starts this weekend and the whole project will be done by Halloween). But you can’t just go from camping to an audition. No one wants to give work to someone who smells like a house fire. Unless, I guess, you’re a fireman. Which I’m not.
So the routine was the same every morning. Get up, eat some sausages and s'mores, clean up the site, head for home and get ready for an audition (there were callbacks yesterday). I hope I get into the film, because leaving a campsite to come home and hang out for a few hours is a strange feeling. Camping in LA, I suppose.
We didn’t get attacked by sharks or contract West Nile Virus either. Not for lack of trying. But there were pelicans, a wide assortment of other beach birds, seals and even some dolphin. None of which wanted to have their pictures taken. Jerks.
In conclusion, I recommend camping at Point Mugu. Where else can you see Ben Stein spending some of his hard-kept money while buying 1,000 bundles of firewood?!
Fun Fact: There is a distinct difference between breathing tobacco smoke and pine smoke. It’s no wonder pine wood cigarettes never caught on.
Oh, and goodbye Christopher Reeve, you were one hell of a guy.
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