#1: Shawnee State Park, West Portsmouth, Ohio, June 1-2, 2013

It's official!

In the midst of the Shawnee State Forest

Our happy little tent

Sunday morning breakfast

Hiding out in the tent waiting for the rain to pass.  The mist was beautiful.

Taking some time to journal a bit.

"The Akron"

Swimming in the lake while out on the pedal boat.  As it turns out, this was not acceptable to the park rangers.  Swimming can only happen in "designated areas".

Roosevelt Lake

These ducks are swimming in the "designated swimming" area

More Roosevelt Lake

Distance from home: 107 miles of beautiful Ohio (approx 2.5 hour drive time)

Park history:  Nestled in the midst of 63,000 acres of the Shawnee State Forest, the park is in an area that used to be hunting grounds for the Shawnee Indians.  The lands for the park and forest were purchased in 1922, and the park was first known as the Theodore Roosevelt State Game Preserve.  With the development of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and the Division of Parks and Recreation, this area was designated as a state park in 1949 and became the Shawnee State Park.  

Stuff to do:  Camping (cabins and cottages also available... or stay at the Lodge, which we didn't go into, but looks quite nice from the outside), boating, fishing, hiking, swimming, golfing, putt-putt, bike rentals, nature center, tennis courts, basketball and volleyball courts, and an archery range.  Basically, enough to keep you occupied for at least a few days if you want the full experience.  There is also a 60 mile backpack trail that winds through the park and state forest for the more adventurous variety.

June 1

Having decided to skip hockey practice, Jayden and I left home around 9am Saturday morning to begin our first official State Park adventure.  Our first task upon arrival was to visit the camp store to secure ourselves a campsite and go get our stuff set up.  After that, the plan was to go for a bit of a hike, as there are several trails at the park.  Unfortunately, after unpacking, I discovered we had everything we needed... except our shoes (flop #1).  I was still slightly tempted to go hiking anyway, but I'm pretty sure my feet would have been pretty torn up wearing flip-flops.  Next I realized we had actually set our tent up on the neighboring site's space (flop #2), so rather than move everything, I decided to just go to the camp store to tell them we needed to switch.  That was an easy fix.  While at the camp store, we picked up a few bundles of firewood and rented a pedal boat for two hours.  

Shawnee State Park has two lakes, Roosevelt Lake and Turkey Creek Lake.  Turkey Creek is the much larger of the two, but the pedal boats (and kayaks and canoes if you're interested) are docked on Roosevelt Lake.  Although quite beautiful, one hour would have been quite sufficient to explore Roosevelt Lake.  Jayden enjoyed himself by taking a few dips into the lake until the park rangers kindly corrected that behavior.  I can't quite figure out why it matters, but we'll be compliant and follow the rules.  At any rate, we did continue to float around Roosevelt Lake for 2 hours, and upon arriving back at the dock, flop #3 took place.  I had had the brilliant idea of using the carabiner clip that I keep my keys on to secure the backpack to one of the backseats on the boat.  I can almost guarantee that if I had not done so, the entire backpack would have found a way to fall into the lake, which would have not been so good.  Almost as soon as I had asked Jayden to leave the backpack so I could take care of it and make sure nothing went falling into the creek, down went a ring of keys.  I was at least aware that it was NOT my car key (thank goodness), but I was pretty sure it was our house key.  It's quite possible that many less than nice words escaped my mouth at that point in time.  We both broke the park ranger's rules and jumped in the lake in an attempt to find my keys.... but the bottom was at least a foot of mushy nastiness.  We spent a good 10 minutes digging our feet around the bottom in search of the keys with no success.  Another lady had actually jumped in fully clothed to help as well, but it was all for naught- those keys are gone for good.  Upon exiting the nasty water, we were both covered in black nastiness, me more so than Jayden.  Seriously, I had nastiness EVERYWHERE, including my private bits.  It was not enjoyable.  And we both smelled like skunk.  Anyway, kudos to the kind lady who jumped in and tried to help!  No doubt she stunk nicely as well.  Once again, as we were climbing out of the water, a park ranger passed (I'm pretty sure he was about to tell us to get out of the lake)... upon hearing our story, he said he'd try to find something to try to retrieve my keys.  So we waited, probably about 20 minutes until he got back.  While waiting, we watched four rather large teenagers (I mean large) board one of the pedal boats.  I have to admit, I just couldn't stop staring.  I know it's mean, but these kids were all quite hefty, and I was fairly certain the boat would just sink.  It took some finangling, but they finally all made it onto the boat and started out- barely floating.  All of about 30 seconds later, the largest of them all was in terrified tears and wanting off.  Her friends obliged, but she just about ended up in the water (once again, not in the designated swimming area) in her attempt to get out.  Eventually, the ranger came back with a large magnet attached to the end of a rope.  After several minutes and several tosses, we came up empty as I had expected.  I guess it was worth a shot.  Thanks, Mr. Ranger for your time and effort!  

With no keys and covered in muck, we made our way back to the camp site, got a change of clean clothes and our towels, and headed to the bathrooms to shower off.  For being a public shower room at a state park, I was pretty impressed.  With no shoes to go for a hike, we opted to just hang out at the tent for awhile, and I eventually started a fire and put our dinners together (steak marinated in terriyaki sauce and some veggies, all wrapped up in foil, hobo dinner style).  Our foil dinner packs were only on the fire for about 10 minutes when the sky opened up and torrential rain ensued.  Weather.com predicted this one perfectly ;)  Needless to say, the fire went out and our dinners did not exactly cook.  When the rain eventually slowed a bit, J grabbed some pretzels and pop tarts out of the food tub and that became our dinner in our tent.  This is when we discovered that they keys that went in the lake were not our house keys after all (awesome)- what went in the lake was the keyring with all of those silly little rewards card tags.  Roosevelt Lake can keep 'em!  Have I mentioned that I love storms?  Because it's true, I do.  And despite the storm ruining our dinner and being soaking wet confined to a tent, it was a great storm.  I was particularly fond of the sound of the rain hitting the trees and the tent.  When the rain finally went away around 8:30ish, I got another fire going and we roasted some marshmallows.  Jayden wants the marshmallows for s'mores, I just want them for their yummy gooeyness, no chocolate or graham crackers needed!  

Storms approached again around 10, so I called it a night.  Who knows how late J stayed up.

June 2
Call me weird, but I really enjoyed camping with the storms.  While I didn't get a LOT of sleep, I got more than I expected, and we both got up & got moving at 7am.  As it turns out, our tent has a couple of small leaks going on, so I'll need to figure out where those are coming from before our next camping trip.  Our first task of the day was to get a fire going to cook up some breakfast.  Once again, hobo-style with hashed browns, eggs, sausage and cheese.  These turned out quite nicely, thank you very much.  Our plan (yep, here we go again) was to clean up, get changed and go swimming in the officially designated swimming area, take a SHORT hike while wearing flip flops, and visit the nature center before heading home.  When I got back to the tent after a trip to the bathroom to clean up and change, I found Jayden curled up in a ball crying in pain.  I'll leave it at this: I think he will respect fire a bit more in the future (flop #4).  Thank goodness for our handy dandy first aid kid with burn cream and sterile gauze... and so much for our other plans for the day.  I managed to get everything packed up and loaded into the van within an hour, and away we went.  We did stop at the official state park sign to get our picture before leaving, though.

Conclusion:  Our first official Ohio State Parks trip was a bit of a flop, but we still had fun and learned a lot.  I've lived in Ohio for all but one year of my life, and have never been down that way in Ohio.  It was absolutely beautiful, and I'm going to need to get back there again to check out the hiking eventually.  We passed three other state parks on the way down there, so I'll at least get to enjoy some of the scenery again.    The drives may very well turn out to be one of my favorite aspects of this whole thing.  I'm definitely looking forward to seeing more of my Ohio.  Also, don't forget about what's frequently said about the best laid plans...

Oh, and our shoes were waiting for us when we got back home :)