The planning for the camping and the drive had started a couple of days back, with me trying to find out where to rent the tents from and the car from… I booked and canceled and booked and canceled the car booking a number of times, before we finalized the Enterprise Rentals for a compact car…

Pritam had already made the bookings for the camping site and the rafting and this was going to be an exciting weekend for sure… for two reasons, 1 that I was going to drive and second I was going to a place that I had never been to before, oh and 3 because I was camping which I had never done, and 4 because I would not have accompalished the not so common Rafting in two continents tag 😛 (Aro, Tushar, Subbu, Deepu… guys are you jealous 😀)

The initial plan was that these guys would pick me up from my apartment saturday morning but we figured that its going to waste time so I packed my bags and went along on friday itself to Pritam’s place… we had a list of things to do and the one on the top of the list was to get the rental car… The girl at enterprise happily upgraded us to a larger car and gave us a weekend deal which basically saved us atleast $40 per day for the 3 days we were renting the car for…

We were just sitting when one of the group said that we should leave friday night itself, there was no reason to wait till morning to drive to Wisconsin… The idea sounded better than trying to wake up at 4 in the morning… so i quickly went to bed (This was around 7 that we decided this and I had 3-4 hours to catch a nap)… Pritam woke me up at 11 and we were ready to move by 0100 hrs…

Next I know is that we drove and we drove and drove… The guy at the camp said that we should throw our GPS out of the window because its not going to take us to the camp, rather might just make us loose our way 😀 however I had the google map for the nearest town and then a smaller map for the way from Lakewood to the Kosir’s camp site next to river Peshtigo… so partly the map helped and the rest we managed with the GPS… also did manage to sleep for a couple of hours when Pritam took over the driving bit from me…

These are when we took a photography break on the Highway 32… the light was great and the weather wonderful… and we could not resist stopping for a while and just admiring the country side… The gentleman in the picture below came out of his barn and gave us company for a while and talked about the town etc… It was not very common for him to find strangers parked near his place and roaming around… and that too Indians 😀

We reached lakewood without getting much lost, but had to call the camp to find some directions to the site… was not too tough and we were at the camp in another 45 minutes…
Now came the challenge… none of us had ever put up a tent before and the instructions did not seem to be enough for the entire thing to be building up from that bag… we still tried and after a hardship of about 30 minutes and misunderstanding the instructions, we were able to put the tent up exactly the way it was supposed to be… the second tent took less time and the third one was done up in 10 minutes flat !!! Meanwhile the ipod and the speakers were also set up and soft hindi music had started playing in our camp site…

Mornings are time for breakfast, and because we had a lot of bread and strawberry jam and haldiram namkeens and biscuits… the first meal at the camp was not a problem at all… infact it was nice eating in the (almost) wild like that… None of us except one had mobile signals on their cell and it was a good feeling to be honest 🙂

When we finally decided to move away from the camp and explore the area, we realised that there was an annual parade going on…. a small one but a nice one where a lot of people from the town participated… I think it had to do something with the fire department of the county as a lot of fire engines were a part of it….

It had some things that can cause fire too, as you see in the picture below 🙂

We decided to turn back and explore the place on foot before we take the cars out and go to the waterfall that we were supposed to go to… and below is what I clicked on the small 45 minute walk around the camp….

We finally managed to get out of the camp, also managed to get lost and find our way back towards the camp and then towards the waterfall that we were trying to go to…

But this was not a waterfall but a small park with some bridges on the river… I was happy to be there, took my camera out and went shooting again, while the rest of the gang was happy exploring the place in the other direction too…

And when there is water and there are boys, it does not take much to get in and have a ball !!! so there were we enjoying the warm water stream and being the kids we always miss in ourselves….

We were then told that we were not too far away from the waterfall either, and we decided that the second part of the fun was going to be at the waterfall… so the guys just hopped on in the cars… in watever form they were and we drove to the waterfall some 5 miles away 🙂

While the rest of the gang jumped into the water rightaway to have their second half of taking a fun bath, i decided to call it quits and just walked around taking some pictures…. check out the place like I did below 🙂

We left the Goodman park in about an hours time and I was very very happy to see this part of the US… typically one would associate US with tall buildings and busy downtowns and here we were in the middle of nowhere, with our phones not working and cars being seen at the rate of 1 every 30-45 minutes….

Back at the camp in the evening, we did not have much to do so we decided to just walk around the camp… there were 26 camp sites in the camp and most of them were occupied…. small tents, big tents, family tents, campers and jeeps, everything was there….

The bus that Kosir’s use to ferry rafters in the Peshtigo river camp…

We were just hanging out at our camping site not doing anything… the picture below is our camp site (#10)… you can see our 3 tents and the two cars parked…

No camping is complete without a campfire and we had made all arrangements for it too… got some extra firewood to ensure that the fire stays till we manage to stay awake… I was pretty tired from my day so I decided to call it a day around 2200 and the rest of the guys I guess were awake till midnight before they decided to sleep off too…

I woke up at 0400 hrs to pee, and when I got out of my sleeping bag ( man it was tough or tough to get out of it in pitch dark) and the tent I saw one of the most spectacular sights ever… Second to Pangong Tso I must say… the sky was studded with stars and no two stars were more than 1 mm away from each other… absolutely brightly lit sky this was… I forgot to pee too 😀 and kept looking at it for a while before I realised that nature was calling for something else other than just stars as well 🙂

We all woke up around 0900 hrs in the morning and lazyly just sat around not doing anything… we had to read the rafting campsite around 1400 hrs and had a lot of time on hand so there was no hurry of any sort…

These two girls in the picture below were roaming all around the camp on their miniature bike… very cute girls they were…

I decided to pick up my lenses and take pictures around the camp again… here is what I clicked…

And then there was time to take pictures of the gang I was travelling with… so here we go 🙂

We finally drove out around 12 and reached the other site in abot 45 minutes… did not have much to do except just hang around the laaaaaaaaaaaaarge open spaces and I could not think of anything but to take out my camera and take more pictures…

We went out for rafting around 1430 hrs and well.. what can I say except that I love Rishikesh and I love the Ganges… there was just one rapid ( grade IV) and we did that twice… thats it !!! lets just forget it !!! ( so guys, don’t be jealous ! this was more of a water park ride that I did )

Suman dislocated his shoulder while he was being pulled up on the raft… now this was some stupid thing which I must mention here… the guys were pulled up with their hands, which increased the probability of an injury for obvious reasons… our guides in Rishikesh always say that pull a guy up holding the life jacket and not anything else…

The instructor arranged for Suman to be taken to the hospital where he was taken care of just fine… the picture below is in the hospital parking lot…

And this is Suman, who looks more treated than he was actually… not sure why all these wires were fixed to him…. he slept most of his way back home though… I drove half the distance and then Pritam took over….

Got back only by 0300 hrs and managed to sleep for 4 hours before we returned the car, and then the tents and reached office… All in all a wonderful weekend… something that I would like to remember for a long time 🙂

God bless !!!