The Worst Campsite Yet Award

We arrived in Sedona a little tired, and decided to eat out for dinner rather than cook, since we didn’t have much food to make that night anyway. After dinner, we headed to our campsite.

I don’t remember the name of the place we stayed that night, but it wins the Worst Campsite Yet Award. When we arrived, we felt lucky to get the last spot in the small campground, but quickly realized why that spot was the last taken. It was directly downwind of both the outhouses and the garbage bins that had not been emptied in quite a while apparently – the smell was pretty bad. Also, next to the outhouses, pointed directly at our tent, was the brightest damned Coke machine I’ve ever seen. Becca and I kept waking up every few minutes thinking it was morning already because our tent was lit up like a circus. Eventually, Becca told me I would be her hero if I went and unplugged it – how could I refuse? After that we slept like babies… until the car alarm in the site next to us went off for a minute or 2 before someone figured out how to turn it off. But after that we slept like babies.

We have had pretty good camping experiences so far, so just those things are more than enough for the place to win the Worst Campsite Yet Award hands down, but the topper is that before we went to bed, we were sitting and planning where we were headed next, when we heard a “POP-BANG” from the road about 200-ft behind us, and 20-ft up. Cars had been driving down the road all evening, and we didn’t give it much thought. A full 4 seconds later, it hit us; they hit us is more like it. They landed on us, coming between Becca’s head and mine, one landing on my forearm, a few on the map on Becca’s lap, and a couple more on one of the guidebooks we had open. What were they? That’s what we wanted to know. They looked a little like watered-down marinara sauce, but as near as we could piece together with the reactions of the other campers in the campsite, the “POP-BANG” was a car hitting an animal on the road, and the drops were the blood/guts that were shot from the body. Nasty, nasty, nasty. Ew.