This past weekend my wife and I took our final camping trip of the year. We booked it a bit further into October than we normally do and by the end of the weekend we realized how that may have been a bit of a mistake.
I had just returned home from a professional conference (you can expect the post on that sometime this week), and I quickly had to turn around and get the travel trailer hooked up and ready to go so we could leave when 
Some people prefer to fill the trailers with fresh water and home and travel to the campground that way. Others choose to wait and fill their trailers when they get to the campground. There are a couple schools of thought on this:
Filling with water adds about 300 to 400 pounds to your trailer (depending on the size of your freshwater tank). If your tank doesn't have proper supports the extra weight can cause your fresh water tank to basically fall out mid trip. Additionally, the added weight can make towing difficult depending on how equally matched your tow vehicle and trailer are.
The other school of thought is, you never know what you are going to run into, so why not be prepared... Our trailer has bracing under the tank to support the extra weight, so we generally fill before we leave. In the case of this weekend, that was a very good thing.
As you can see from the pictures above, the campground was pretty dead. I mean so dead that there wasn't even a park ranger at the check in station. Besides us and our friends, there were only two other sets of campers in the whole park. It was pretty crazy to have free reign of the whole place.
That came with a couple of drawbacks though. The modern rest rooms had been closed down and locked up for the year. They had also shut down the sanitation station. If you aren't familiar with the term, the sanitation station is where you can stop to fill up your camper with fresh water when you get to the campground. It is also the place where you dump your gray and black tanks when you leave.
Since the sanitation station was shut down, it was a good thing that we had already filled our trailer. We quickly called our friends to let them know they needed to fill their trailer with fresh water if they hadn't already.
It wasn't the case this weekend, but in the summer it is also beneficial to have your fresh tank filled prior to arriving because then you can just go to your camp site and get set up. Typically there is a long line of people waiting to fill their trailers with fresh water after they check in. I love being able to fly past them and go right to our site.
I knew it was likely going to be quite cold and I knew we might be getting to the campground a bit late since I was driving home from my conference and my wife had to work a full day. Keeping that in mind, I decided to pick up campfire wood ahead of time so I didn't have to go hunting around for it after we got the trailer set up.
I found a cute little farmers market near my conference in Traverse City and they were selling these big boxes of wood for $40. I had to manually move each piece to the bed of my truck and it barely fit, but I am happy to say it lasted us the whole weekend and ended up being the perfect amount.
At first Jovi had a tough time getting back into "camping mode". In fact, about fifteen minutes into our drive she ended up going poo in the back seat of my truck so we had to pull over to the side of the expressway and clean that up before we could continue.
Once our friends showed up, she knew that her family unit was complete and she settled right back into the groove of camping. As you can see by the photo above!
Typically we have to keep her on a six foot lead and she is always barking at everyone that walks by. This trip we let her roam free with her lead only attached at one end. It was fun watching her explore.
Because it was so late in the season, the colors on the trees were pretty much past their prime. Many of the leaves had already fallen and we didn't get a chance to see a ton of color like we do when we make this trip earlier in October.
This is basically the same photo, but I let Google Photos do some post processing on it see if it could make the colors "pop" a little more.
At the end of the weekend we had to drive about eight miles north to a truck stop and pay $5 to dump our waste tanks. It was a minor inconvenience, but in the grand scheme of things not that horrible. Saturday we borrowed our friends TV and watched the Michigan/Michigan State game. You can read all about that on my 
What I really loved about this trip was the fact that we could pretty much be as loud as we wanted. We played our music and sat around the fire laughing and singing late into the night without the worry of Park Services coming around and telling us we were being too loud.
Saturday there was a solar flare, so we were hoping to get a chance to see the Aurora that night, but it didn't pan out for us. While the cloud cover was minimal, I think the flare reached the Earth earlier in the day when it was still daylight and you couldn't see the effects.
I don't know as though we would camp again this late into the year, but this was definitely a trip to remember!
