{"id":7604,"date":"2011-07-29T05:28:10","date_gmt":"2011-07-29T09:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sweetshoppedesigns.com\/?p=7604"},"modified":"2011-12-16T09:25:35","modified_gmt":"2011-12-16T14:25:35","slug":"365-days-of-bliss-cabin-camping-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sweetshoppedesigns.com\/index.php\/2011\/07\/365-days-of-bliss-cabin-camping-fail\/","title":{"rendered":"365 Days of Bliss – Cabin Camping Fail"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi there Sweet Shoppers! Jen Tapler here with another Blissful post to share with you today. Actually, if I’m being perfectly honest, I don’t have too many blissfully positive things to say about our somewhat failed cabin camping experience a few weeks ago. Now, I have to tell you that the Taplers are campers – the real deal – we backpack on a regular basis (the kind where we pack in all of our supplies over 8+ miles to a campsite, set up camp, then continue on the next day – carrying everything we need on our backs – tent, sleeping bags, clothes, food, etc). We are NOT experienced cabin campers. We do sometimes “car camp” in a tent at the beach, but there’s no electrical hookups or bathrooms or running water. When we camp, we typically CAMP. So when we decided to rent the cabin up at Polipoli State Park on the slopes of Haleakala we figured this would be CAKE for us. I had heard the cabin was super nice and even had hot running water with an indoor bathroom (including shower!) – it sounded more like a crappy hotel than camping to me. So we made some plans, loaded up the car, and headed upcountry for our adventure. Have I mentioned that we live in Hawaii? Well, we live on the island of Maui, pretty much AT sea level, and the majority of our camping over the last 8 years has been done AT sea level in this year-round tropical paradise climate. Polipoli State Park (where we have hiked on numerous occasions) is at about 6800 ft elevation, right at cloud level on Maui. When you live on Maui you hardly ever leave and you certainly don’t go anywhere cold (for one thing you don’t own too many cold weather clothes and your 4-yr-old son likely has never worn socks and FREAKS STRAIGHT OUT if you put long sleeves or long pants on him as I might have mentioned once before, and for another thing – WHY? you’re likely a gigantic weather weenie. So yeah. No cold weather). But we’ll get back to all of that eventually. The road up to PoliPoli State Park is a long, narrow, winding dirt road that takes FOREVER. There are about 4 tent camping sites and 1 cabin in the middle of the 21,000-acre Kula Forest Reserve (and this part of Maui looks more like the Pacific Northwest than typical Hawaii – with lots of pine, ash, cypress, huge Redwoods, and eucalyptus trees. It smells AWESOME). We arrived at the cabin around 10:00 a.m. and it really was super nice and the views down to the central valley between Haleakala and the West Maui Mountains were breathtaking.<\/p>\n

A few days before our adventure, I decided to create a fun little “Treasure Hunt” for my son Dean. I used Cindy’s new-ish Listmakers 1 Templates<\/a> along with Traci and Meg’s Summer Staycation: At the Campout<\/a> kit to make a sort of scavenger hunt type list of things for us to search for each day on our hikes and near the cabin in the Polipoli area. I printed out the list and attached it to a sturdy piece of cardstock so we could take it with us. I had planned to take photos as we found each item on the list, but that didn’t really happen. We ended up just using a crayon and checking things off the list as we found them.<\/p>\n

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As it turned out, Dean ended up finding everything on the list in the first half hour we were there! I had hoped this would occupy him for MUCH longer than that! I mean come on – a wild pig!? really? What are the chances? We saw one of those on the drive to Polipoli before we ever even got there!! {sigh}. But not to fear, TuTu (my Mom, who went with us) created an even more exciting Treasure Hunt and came up with an elaborate story about pirates (and the Goonies! ha!) and buried treasure. She even came prepared with a little velvet bag full of coins and “jewels” that she hid under a rock. She wrote out very elaborate instructions for finding the Buried Treasure that required the use of a compass (great learning experience for Dean who is now an expert compass-user!). The instructions included things like “Walk east from the front door of the cabin 15 steps toward the ash pit. Spit into the ash pit 3 times, then walk 20 steps south to the concrete pillar”. It was great and Dean LOVED it! There were a total of 20 step-by-step instructions leading him to the buried treasure and he was SO excited when he found it! Here are a few pictures from his TuTu-created treasure hunt:<\/p>\n

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So, the two treasure hunts combined ended up taking about an hour and a half and then we had A LOT of trouble convincing Dean to go on a hike. He was WAY too excited to be camping in a cabin (we never should have called this experience camping as now he’ll expect a cabin every time we go camping, something he had never experienced before). But by lunchtime the clouds were starting to roll in anyway and I was FREEZING. We don’t tolerate any real fluctuations in temperature very well. We pretty much freak out if it’s colder than about 68 degrees or hotter than about 87 degrees. Well, at 6800 ft elevation in the middle of a cloud I can tell you it’s colder than 68 degrees! And those clouds roll in FAST! Take a look at these 2 photos of the cabin. The time stamp on these 2 photos is literally only 8 minutes apart. Isn’t that crazy?<\/p>\n

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Once those clouds rolled in Dean and I pretty much didn’t leave the cabin the rest of the day. I convinced my husband Joel to build a fire in the wood-burning stove in the cabin and we sat inside and read stories and relaxed and froze our butts off! Joel entertained himself on the back lanai of the cabin with his ukulele. I will say that playing a ukulele inside a cloud makes for some interesting acoustics…<\/p>\n

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Joel decided to go ahead and grill our dinner (bison burgers) early so we could all huddle up for warmth in the cabin, knowing it would get much colder once the sun went down! We then discovered that although we had packed a means for grilling (a half keg contraption to contain a fire with a grill on top) we didn’t have any type of spatula! So Joel had to fashion one out of a piece of wood he found in the woods!!<\/p>\n

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But dinner was tasty and we did end up roasting a few marshmallows over that fire in a keg thing. We went to bed early and all decided to sleep in the main room of the cabin in front of the wood burning stove. I didn’t get much sleep at all as I was the one adding wood to the fire every 45 minutes trying to keep it going so we’d stay warm (Joel somehow managed to fall asleep the instant he was horizontal!). Let me just say that I thought I was a weather weenie before this experience, but this trip confirmed it. I slept in sweatpants and a tank top layered under a t-shirt, a fleece pullover, a zip-up hoodie, a windbreaker and a stocking cap, and inside my mummy bag that’s rated for 0 degrees! And I was still cold all night! I must have fallen asleep at some point because I woke up at 4:57 a.m. (I know because I looked at my phone) and the fire had gone out and I was shivering. I decided right then that the instant everyone was awake we were packing up all this crap and heading for home in the warm sun at SEA LEVEL where the temperatures are what they should be when you live in paradise!! And that’s exactly what we did. We had planned to stay for a few days but nobody was having any fun in that cold weather cooped up inside that cabin. When we got home I visited the Maui Mesonet page to see just how cold it was and (do NOT laugh) the low temperature that night was 44 degrees!!! Now I know what everyone is thinking (especially those of you on the US mainland experiencing 30+ days of 100+ degree weather), but cut me some slack. I’m not used to that. I live day in and day out pretty much in temperatures that range from about 74-86 degrees. I keep my thermostat at home set on 81 degrees and if I hear my A\/C kick on (or if I have to pull the comforter over me at night) I know it’s time to close the windows in my house. Lesson learned. No more extreme weather cabin camping for the Tapler family!<\/p>\n

*I used Janet’s All These Photos 1<\/a> for some of the photo boards in this post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi there Sweet Shoppers! Jen Tapler here with another Blissful post to share with you today. Actually, if I’m being perfectly honest, I don’t have too many blissfully positive things to say about our somewhat failed cabin camping experience a few weeks ago. Now, I have to tell you that the Taplers are campers – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":156,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[129],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sweetshoppedesigns.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7604"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sweetshoppedesigns.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sweetshoppedesigns.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sweetshoppedesigns.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/156"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sweetshoppedesigns.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7604"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.sweetshoppedesigns.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10118,"href":"https:\/\/www.sweetshoppedesigns.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7604\/revisions\/10118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sweetshoppedesigns.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sweetshoppedesigns.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sweetshoppedesigns.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}