A Night to Remember (or Not)

In all of our travels so far, we've found our campgrounds to be farely quiet.  We've mostly stayed in KOA campgrounds and in visiting with other campers we find that all of us are travelling from one point to another and just stopping over for a night or two.  Well, that all changed when we pulled into the Basswood Resort just outside of Kansas City.

It's hard to tell what a campground will be like just from searching the internet.  The Basswood was set up just like our KOA stopovers with rows of campers lined up side by side.  However, the Basswood was a destination location.  When we pulled in at 10:00 pm after visiting my Aunt, we found that the campground was completely full and even at that late hour, it was bubbling with activity. We arrived at our site to see that our neighbors had kind of spilled over into our campsite.  They had a tent trailer and a tent and there were about a dozen people sitting around their campfire.  They were obviously there with friends.  We found them to be very polite, offering to help us set up and inviting us to enjoy their fire with them.  We declined as we were tired and just wanted to go to bed.  We set up and settled down for the night fairly quickly.

However, we found ourselves to be miserably hot. This was our first experience with humidity and the first evening that we were uncomfortably hot at bedtime.  Lying there sweating in bed, we discovered that we were also in the flight path of the airport (fortunately, only a handful went over but they were loud when they did).  And, to top it off, our neighbors didn't feel the need to go to sleep.  They stayed up talking just outside our trailer long into the night.  We chose not to ask them to be quiet because we knew that they were just enjoying a camping trip with friends and they were not being loud or obnoxious. 

It was 2:00 a.m. when we heard the first crash of thunder.  This finally sent our neighbors to bed, however their noise was replaced by thunder and wind.  Bethany was awakened and scared and reminded me of myself when I was probably around her age and experienced thunder storms while camping with relatives in Colorado.  She joined us in bed.  We might have finally gotten some sleep but both Virginia and Lillian fell out of bed.  In fact, Lillian did it twice.  Let's just say by morning we didn't feel very well rested.  We were surprised to find that our neighbors beat us out of bed in the morning.  With their late night, they were still up by 7:00. 

We could have been frustrated but instead we just laughed.  Our attitude is that it is just all part of our adventure.  Some might say that KOA camping isn't really camping, but for this trip, we are just looking for a place to lay our heads and we can now see the benefits of staying in a place where everyone else agrees.

Here is the Basswood Resort.  Our tent trailer is the one just past the minivan.  Between us and the tent trailer on this side of us, our neighbors had set up a tent on the small stretch of grass.  Quite a bit different than the camping we are used to.  Children were riding bikes up and down the streets and the place was bustling with activity!  There were four small lakes that the campground stocked with fish.