phat:

That story is a classic and thank god the GoPro hadn't been invented yet...

My wife and my's first backpacking trip was to New Mexico with a long-term friend, somewhere above Sante Fe. We had in our packs a 3-liter jug of really bad Gallo wine, that eventually we drank and then carried that heavy glass container out. This was the start of my "air-camping" adventures -- flying from Miami to somewhere mountainous -- and when we arrived at the Albuquerque airport we found out that although we had a car reservation, we had no car cause it was balloon fest weekend. "So give us a van, a truck!" we demanded. "Get lost," they replied. So we found "Rent-A-Wreck" in the phone book -- remember those -- and they rented us a piece of junk that once we got up the mountain we realized had only three lug nuts on the left-front wheel. We arrived late and headed up, finally stopping to camp just off trail at dark, and pitched the tent on an absurdly steep hill and woke up in the bottom of the tent. But we had a great time and we were hooked.


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- kevon

(avatar: raptor, Lake Dillon)