NY Camping Trip 2025

ugh i have re-written this whole thing because when I inserted an image link the whole page refreshed and I lost all my writing.... So I'm going to be a bit brief compared to draft 1. XI 

Anyways, my buddy Mike invited me on a camping trip with himself, Kenny, and Marijo in tow. I'll start with a little background on each of these guys.

Mike is a fellow mech e man, and Id known him ~2 years up to this point. We went through the trenches of Kinematics and Vibrations together. We studied in the same group and got shit done. We would also go grab some chik filet on campus every so often too. Even though he lives on the other side of town I was still able to get him out for some of my awesome volleyball action at the beach, and my yearly summer potlucks. He's one of the best volleyball players in the crew up there with Marijo, Aidan, and Braden. Anyways, he's a good guy to get work done or do some good BS'ing with, and i enjoy his company quite a bit.

Kenny is another fellow mech e man (all these guys are mech e), I was introduced to him about a year ago now (he's in my friend Chloe's band), but we didn't start to get to knowing each other until the start of this year, and I'd say we really hit it off on this trip and have been becoming better friends since! He plays base guitar, takes lessons, and teaches it too! He's another guy that's great to work with and even greater for BS'ing and doing kool stuff. 

Out of the camping crew I have known Marijo the longest. He's a kool/upstanding gent, and has been a regular at my volleyball games and potlucks for years, my good friend Braden introduced us. Marijo is hands-down the best volleyball player in our crew, and soccer player too. Although I've known him for a while, I can't say I know him super well. He's a pretty reserved guy and I respect that. We'd usually just talk like volleyball/school stuff so I was thinking what am i gonna talk about all weekend?? Well, we all carpooled to NY, and I'd say ~20min into the drive it devolved into crazy conspiracy theories and that's when Marijo and I popped off and educated the other guys, the rest of the ride went by so fast. I'd say after this trip I know Marijo better now and enjoy his company more.

I'm gonna run thru some of the trip highlights:

We were on Mike's parents' property out near a ski town in NY. Its a 'narrow' plot of ~10 acres. It has a house and a barn out front, a cleared field a ways behind that, a nice sized pond, and behind that there's a cleared hill where we set up camp. We camped out there in tents Friday-Sunday.

On the trip we ate 20 burgers, ~4lbs of lunch meat, a lot of cheese, some hard cider, 2 gallons of regular apple cider, 4 potatoes, 18 eggs, and a lot of sausage links. I was the grillmaster for the burgers ofc! Those guys did a great job cooking up breakfast every morning.

On the first night after setting up camp and eating those 20 burgers, we went to the big field and set off a bunch of fireworks! We had some crazy roman candles, some nice fountains, and a couple bricks of firecrackers. Even though we blew off the 'Merica fireworks first, that box was still smoking at the end, so luckily we had enough fluid to put it out..

^^me

On day two after we had 9 eggs we did some hiking around the property and a lot of fishing. At the pond we caught a lot of blue gills, and Kenny had the honor of catching the elusive big bass in the pond. When those guys were fishing I explored the nearby creek looking for bait, but instead I found a bunch of awesome newts and salamanders! That was definitely one of the big trip highlights for me, as I love those critters!

Eastern Newt

^^I felt like a NatGeo photographer taking this :)

^^Dirty Salamander

Of course we broke up the fishing with throwing firecrackers at a bunch of random things!  A cool way to throw the firecrackers would be to time it just right so that the firecracker would explode just as it went under the surface of the water, it'd make a plop sound. After we grabbed dinner in town we blew off the rest of our roman candles as you'll see below. We duct-taped the roman candle to a broken pallet piece and shot it off over the pond at each other!

It was a totally awesome trip!!