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The only tidbit of truth in this tale is I once went camping with a girlfriend and her sister. And no, this story does not have any sister-sister incest. It will be in two parts. The second part will follow in a few days.

LarryInSeattle took a first stab at editing. I changed a few sections after he returned it. Any remaining errors are mine alone.

As always comments are welcome, even negative ones if they are constructive.

Enjoy.

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A sure sign of impending old age is the irresistible need to give advice to people who haven't asked for it. I have no business offering advice on women, relationships or marriage. I'll try to stick to what I know.

One -- unless you are camping alone bring more than one flashlight.

Two -- fuck the forecast; put the rain fly up.

Three -- if your girlfriend's parents insist you bring her younger sister as a chaperone carefully consider your motives. Go, if all you wanted to do was camp. If you planned on more than camping, forget it and avoid the frustration.

Four -- don't punch anything stronger than the bones in your hand. Not punching anything is even better.

Let's start with the first piece of advice. When you wake, whether due to the heat, the incessant whir of the cicadas, or your aching balls, you'll want a flashlight to avoid catching your foot on a tree root and sprawling onto your hands and knees. If you only have one flashlight and that one is in the tent where your girlfriend lies as inaccessible as ever and you don't want to wake her or her kid sister, you will be forced, as I was, to stumble through the dark.

I had not been hurt in the fall. Our tents were pitched under a stand of short leaf pine trees. The ground was blanketed by years' worth of fallen needles. To imagine the tree had been placed there, decades earlier, for the sole purpose of tripping me was ludicrous. But that is how I felt at the time.

Only a few short leaf pines were left, most had been transformed into planks and plywood. Congress declared this chunk of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas a national forest during the Depression but it was already too late. The loggers had taken anything worth the trouble of cutting down. The majority of the trees in the forest were planted after it was designated a National Forest.

When we stopped to check in and pay for our campsite, I told the ranger we were looking for a nice quiet spot, one usually ignored by the car camping crowd. I took his advice even though it meant we were as far from the river as we could be and still be inside the park.

In July, in Missouri, if you went camping, it was to be near water big enough to swim, canoe, or float your inner-tubed ass in. A single road made a circuitous route through the park, giving off side branches as it went. The first part of the road ran along the river. The campsites along the river were always crowded, in fact you needed a reservation to get one. Each of the side roads ended in a service building that provided potable water, showers (with solar heated hot water no less) and flush toilets. Clustered around the service building were anywhere from three to five camping areas, each with four or five campsites. The campsites along the river had electric and water hookups. You could "camp" and watch the baseball game in an air-conditioned RV.

After the road curved away from the river the number of occupied campsites fell off dramatically. At the campground next to ours only a single site was occupied by an old Ford sporting rusted out wheel wells and a camper shell decorated with mildew. If not for the cooler atop the picnic table and the two lawn chairs I would have wondered if the truck had been abandoned and the Park Service simply hadn't had time to tow it away.

Our campground was the furthest from the river. The ranger had steered us to a beautiful spot. The ground had a gentle slope and if the ground was rocky the thick blanket of pine needles hide the fact. The showers were a couple hundred yards away and it's was half-mile hike to the river, but it was a great spot. We pitched our cheap Sears