I’m not particularly superstitious, but maybe don’t go camping on Friday the 13th.

My mind-clearing getaway trip didn’t quite offer the solace I hoped it would, due to numerous complications. Not saying it was all bad, but all told, very few things went according to plan or as I’d have liked.

The first piece, of course, was that the weather leading up to my expedition wasn’t particularly cooperative. In the larger mid-Atlantic region, we’d gotten several inches of rain early last week. The rain was finally letting up when I arrived at my destination, Prince William Forest Park, though that much rain takes nature a while to deal with. Campsites, trails, roads, and pretty much everything else was soaked, if not flooded when I arrived. I was able to find some not-completely-sodden ground on my allotted campsite, though several adjacent ones were completely flooded, as was the access road to reach the area.

I did, however, get my tent set up and gear stowed, except for the stuff I forgot, and had to run to the nearby big box store to aquire (my sleeping bag, for example, didn’t make it into the car, and I grabbed an extra tarp because my ancient tent’s rain fly wasn’t particularly functional). After sorting through all of that, I had a pretty decent, if damp, five mile hike along one of the trails near the campground area, seeing evidence of beavers, but not the beavers themselves. My dinner on the campfire, in spite of all the damp wood, went pretty well. I slept fitfully, but enough to rise early and get myself ready to ride some trails.

It was not to be.

I geared up and attempted a bit of a shakedown ride on a nearby old forest service road, which, sadly, was sodden, covered in slick wet leaves. I hit a particularly slick spot and took a pretty heavy spill about a quarter-mile in. I hit the ground hard, and the bike’s momentum carried it further, down a deep gully bouncing off of the landscape all the way down and hitting a pile of rock about 20 feet below the road.

I was fine, apart from some scratches on my right hand where I braced myself. The bike, however, was a write-off, at least for the trip in question:

What you see in the image above is one of the cranks and the front chainrings bent all to hell, preventing even the most basic rotation of the pedals/drivetrain. Dammit. As I write this, I haven’t actually taken the bike to the shop yet, but a quick bit of research shows me I’m likely out at least $200 in parts alone. Not looking forward to that estimate.

The primary purpose of my trip unavailable to me, I cleaned up a bit, decided to cook a little breakfast (but couldn’t get a fire to take) and tried to salvage things with some hiking. As with the biking routes, the foot trails were largely flooded and unuseable, at times blocked by large fallen trees where the waterlogged soil couldn’t hold the root system securely.

I eventually found some decent ground, and put about ten miles under my feet before returning to the campsite around lunchtime, to find that *another* pole on my ancient dome tent had snapped (I’d been improvising repairs on one broken piece of linkage for years). At that point, I was done.

I was set to camp another night (figuring I’d be riding all day Friday), but after all the setbacks I’d encountered, I couldn’t summon up the energy to either fix the tent or blow some more money to go buy a new one. I took the broken tent down, pitched the corpse in the dumpster on my way to the shower house, cleaned myself up, policed the camp site, and gave up. Sure, I forfeited the $26 campsite fee, but if there’s any public agency I don’t mind giving a little extra budget to, it’s the National Park Service.

I stopped by the visitors’ center on the way out, only to find it had just closed (ugh), and I had the ultra rare bouffalant run away from me in Pokemon Go in the parking lot (double ugh). I was also starting to feel the painful results of my fall and my ten miles of trekking earlier in the day as I limped back to the car (ouch).

So, I made the slow drive home, hitting some Friday afternoon NoVA traffic (damn again), though I found a nice place to stop for a late lunch and a couple of beers in Spencer Devon Brewing in Fredericksburg.

And then, pretty much completely dejected, spent most of the rest of the weekend licking my wounds, enduring the stiffness and soreness, reading and watching mindless television, then returning to work on Monday morning to discover even more of the usual bureaucratic garbage than usual.

So, yay?

So, my trip to clear my head and maybe find some mental solace didn’t work out. It happens. I’ll survive, I think, though I really had invested a lot of hope and energy into this adventure. I still actually do look forward to returning to the site in better conditions, though that won’t be for a while, given the fact that conditions on the ground indicate that things are going to be locking down tightly (and rightly) again soon.

It really was kind of the perfect storm of suck, though, as we are all aware, that’s 2020.