Camping with the fam

So i just got back from 4 days of nature with the family. yes that's right, we went camping. Ok so i wouldn't necessarily call it nature since my uncle bought an RV and when we weren't on his boat doing water sports we were in the camper watching dvd's of old scary movies. But this was nature for a city girl like myself. For instance, I showered only once for the whole 4 days i was there, I didn't care that my virgin feet were being exposed to the elements. But more importantly I ate spam. It was me, my mom's sister Lupe, my uncle Chazz, their two kids Brian (19) and Alexandra (15) and my cousin Mo (12). His name isn't actually Mo, it's Nathan. what happened is that my uncle chazz has this tendency of calling people by wierd nick names that don't necessarily make sense. like my nick name is LeenaWeena because when i was younger he had this little song he'd sing that went something like this.

"cristina -
leena weena
is a friend of mine
Cristina
leena weena
looks like frankenstein!!

And so we call Nathan Mo because he started called him "nathaniel" which evolved into "mofanio" which then became "mo" or "fanny" used unterchangeably. Poor kid is gonna be so messed up when he gets older. Anyways being on a campground full of White trash in campers really changes your perspective. After only a day we suddenly found ourselves sitting on lawn chairs eating chips saying "wow look at that guy's camper! that is a 40 footer 8 wheeler!! Damn that is a sweet camper!" Believe me these are words i never believed would I would utter. And yet we found ourselves awed by a camper knows as "the Raptor." and then suddenly we found ourselves talking to this man who was blasting the country version of "I don't wanna miss a thing" from the back of his raptor and my uncle saying "eey ahh, how much did ya pay for that there camper." i mean really. The picture doesn't really do it justice but i will try to describe it. It was like 45 feet long and we even asked the guy if we could go inside. No shit guys 3 sides of it popped out and there was a master bedroom separted by a wall. A shower, brand new granite top kitchen with aluminum appliances. A decent sized living room with a couch/pull out mattress. And then the most ridiculous part was that in the back it had a garage where you could fit like your ATV's and shit. The guy driving it said that his wife had left him and this was all he had. That was kind of sad to me. More sad than that though was that the people across from us tried to pass of their "rampage" as a "raptor" but really it was the poor man's "raptor." don't you love how they have ridiculous names like that.

I had to include a picture of my cousin's dog KiKi. isn't she the cutest dog ever!! i don't really like animals because they smell and poo everywhere but this dog is just too cute for words.


ooh boochy booch so cute!!!

So one big facet of the trip as i mentioned before was that we would go into the RV during dinner and watch old scary movies like "texas chainsaw massacre" and "the hills have eyes" and the more regrettable "jeepers creepers." I really want those two hours of my life back. Anyways everytime we would watch these movies we would note how the people who always died were dumb white people. Note how you never see a Black or Mexican family taking a roadtrip and saying "oh hey let's stop in this old abandoned sketchy looking gas station." No, shit like that doesn't happen to people of color! Anyways we were going on and on about the dumb people in these movies. So the next day while we were boating around the lake we found this super creepy old abandoned Air Stream camper. The conversation that we had about it when something like this (context: Uncle Charlie has this tendency of trying to make up wierd acryonyms):

"wow look at that creepy trailer! oh my god go closer!!"
"Who do you think lives there?"
"I think it was a guy named TTOD"
"do you think he had a studder?"
"yeah he totally did and peopel called him TTOD because he had a studder"
"why did they call him TTOD"
"Trailer Trash of Death!!"
"Ha ha ha!!"
"hey man NEGOT"
"??"
"Never Ever Go Over There!"
"Ha ha ha!"
"hey hey hey guys what's 3 minus 5? Negot 2!!!"
"HAHAHA"
"Seriously guys we are retarded."

so anyways the rest of the story has to be told in photographs. Note the irony of the fact that the night before we had been criticizing people in scary movies for putting themselves in dumb positions.
so we pulled up closer to the shore so that we could get a better view of Ttod's dwelling. the beach had all kinds of wierd left over cooking equipment and this old abandoned wooden wheel. My uncle and i thought that perhaps this was where the proverbial wheel had been invented.


We had to tie the boat to a log and we left Kiki and my aunt Lupe on the boat. I said "hey guys what should our code for "untie the boat, there's a killer coming!!! be?" My cousing aptly responded "how about, 'RUUUUUN'!!!"
This code word was agreed upon and we trecked up the hill. my cousin Brian broke his leg somewhat recenty so he had a limp. Family in the middle of nowhere, dark Mogelie looking boy with a limp, no one to hear you when you scream...this had all the makings of the perfect scary movie.
On our way up the hill we had picked up a few sticks for weapons, as you can see in nathan's hand. It was seriously creepy.
When we got up close it looked like someone had burned the camper and ripped off the door. Perhaps in a fit of rage Ttod had burnt someone alive. Or maybe the local townsmen had set fire to Ttod's trailer while he was in it to stop the mass murders he was committing in the Lake Nacimiento areas. Who knows.
We figured if we were already there we might as well go in.

Nathan found a piece of wood with "bloody" nails sticking out of it and we decided that perhaps this was Ttod's weapon of choice. The bloodly nails, we later realized were actually red trim painting from the window sill. So anyways we made it out alive and lived to tell the story of Ttod and the pass on the message of NEGOT. Learn it, love it, live it guys.

Later that night we decided to do some night fishing. But we all knew that night fishing was just an excuse for my uncle to tell the fresh meat, nathan, the story of the shit monster. We have all these rites of passage in our family for camping. Like you have to try skiing or tubing with my uncle charlie at least once so that he can be totally abusive to you and drive so fast that you fly off the tube and you hurt yourself so badly that you never want to ski or tube again. Well the Shit Monster is a little bit liek this and when you are young it's actually kind of scary but now we just kind of pass the story on for good times.
As you can see with my wavy thick hair everyday was a bad hair day. So the story goes that one day a long time ago there was a man who had a sudden urge to use the restroom. Now everyone pees in the lake but what he had a sudden urge to do was a little more than peeing. He had a major SA. So he swam out to a remote place and did his buisiness. Little did he know that in that very spot there was a very special strain of bacteria growing, and this bacteria when combined with shit created a living breathing creature whose sole purpose was to kill. It floats around looking like a giant piece of shit and hiding among the green algea of the lake and when you least expect it at night near the fishing docks, the shit monster will pop out of the water like in Creep Show 2 and attack you. As i said before, we are retarded.

here is me doing some ultra cool water sports! Hoorah for heroic feats of athleticism.

So that was basically the gist of the trip. good times were had by all. Oddly enough despite my hatred of the horrendously bad movie "jeepers creepers" the whole drive home on the empty G14 highway i kept expecting to suddenly see a big black creature flying over my car and hear my ipod playing "Jeepers creepers, where'd you get those weepers."
No such thing happened but what i did find was this totally creepy oil digging thing. Someone coudl totally chase you with a chainsaw through this oil field.

But the highlight of my trip was definitely as i drove through Burbank and drove past the Quixote production company where Audrina from The Hills works!! Like Oh my god!!