Dead Flying Squirrel Campground, Iowa

After an amazing few days in Minnesota with Jessy and Nick and all of their friends, we decided it was time to trade in our sweet ass hotel room for some rough-it-in-the-woods camping. We agreed that we wouldn't drive too far the first day so we could spend most of the day with Jessy, so we decided on a campsite near Cedar Rapids, Iowa called "Flying Squirrel Campground." I mean, come on. We had stopped at the grocery store and picked up hotdogs and such to make for a late dinner when we got to our site. We showed up at 9:27. The firewood stand closed at 9:00. Of course.

Out in the middle of no where in Iowa, we were stuck in the dark, with no tent set up and no firewood, which meant no dinner. We were on a mission. Unfortunately, there was no where in 50 miles that sold firewood. We found this out when we stopped at the one gas station anywhere around and the kid told me to check the county fair down the street, and when we asked some old man at the county fair for wood, he pretty much laughed in our faces and told us we were S.O.L. Fun times. We started to drive around like idiots looking for random wood and sticks lying around and I tried to convince Dillon that we should tear up the wooden entryway to this abandoned campground. He didn't really go for that. A little frog did land on the hood of our car at one point though and scared the shit out of us, leaving Dillon shouting, "What do I do?! What do I do?! I don't want to take him out of his natural habitat!" Yah, we're really good at camping.

I decided to carry out option "Last Resort"--finding anyone still awake in our campground and bartering for firewood with them. We came upon one site that was still up with a fire, and I hopped out of the car to ask for a favor. A gigantic 300lb. woman camp romping up to me and took me over to the next door trailer telling me, "Our neighbor's a little crazy, but he has a lot of firewood." We rapped on the door and out came this crazy ass mother. He looked like a skeleton with some dark skin stretched across it, covered up with cut-off Daisy Duke shorts and a tiny little tank top. He was screaming and cussing at his yappy dogs pretty much unaware that I was taking firewood from his pile while he started chasing them around his trailer like an insane person. Dillon started whispering, "Just grab the wood and GO!!!" My only regret was that I did not get a picture of the whole fiasco. I would have put it up on the "people who shop at Walmart" website. But what we did end up with was fire and dinner. Yay. (Side note, if you ever want to see Dillon squirm extremely uncomfortably, take him into a Walmart. He won't take his hands out of his pockets. I think it's cuz he's afraid he's going to get some disease. It's awesome.)

That night we kept smelling something freakin' awful but we just thought it was the lake next to us. We got drunk enough to forget about it and fell asleep, but the next morning...oh. my. god. First of all, if you've ever woken up hungover and smelled the remnants of liquor and beer and such from your night before and almost threw up right then and there, you have a fraction of an idea of what the next morning was like for me. I awoke out of a drunken coma to the most foul, rotting smell I have ever dealt with. I tried to ignore it, but I couldn't. Something was definitely dead somewhere really really close to our tent, and was definitely rotting like hell. I made Dillon wake up when I had gag reflexed upwards of ten times and we packed up our shit as quickly as we could without throwing up on each other. Needless to say, that campground will always be remembered in my mind as the Dead Flying Squirrel Campground.