We had the first weekend-long camping trip at Squam Lake this year last week (yes, there’ll be another one soon). The beautiful Squam Lake is in New Hampshire, and was the stage for the film, “On Golden Pond” with Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn. Early booking is recommended. Those camp sites are quite popular.

We took Kaiju there last September. The camp site we had this time was very similar (and close) to last year’s. What was not similar was that it POURED through the canoe ride there (1 – 1.5 hrs), and all through the first night. Ick. We set up a tarp in the rain so we could have a little non-drenching area, but what we wore (including shoes) and everything we left outside got soaked regardless.

Another difference was that we were a group of 18, this time, instead of 6. Everybody but us set up the tents on a large group site. We got our own site about 10 minutes away, for our skittish pup. This helped a lot. We walked over to the main site for all meals and camp fire, though.

Kaiju, expectedly, did not do well with the large group of people moving around, making noises, especially at night with the camp fire. When he started trembling, we gave him xanax and kept him on our laps (because he’d get so hungry on meds and eat everything in sight, including some weird mushrooms). What an adorable pain in the butt… We gave him a lot of hugs during the day to make up for the stressful nights.

Kaiju definitely enjoyed the camp when we were alone. At our own camp site, we sat and happily watched him chase leaves, throw around the pine cones, dig the ground, and stare at insects. He even acted like a guard dog of our site, and barked at people passing by. We’d prefer if he could just relax and not feel the need to bark at people, but we were glad he seemed more at home on the camp site than he did last year.

It was quite warm throughout the weekend, so we went for a dip in the water several times. Of course, we took Kaiju with us. On the 1st day, he went in with the life vest. The 2nd day, without. He swam just as well without the vest, but both days, he swam straight to the shore. We kept putting him back away from the shore, and then chased after him so he wouldn’t get to the shore before us.

We will head back to the lake in a few weeks. This time, our site will be on an island. And there will be nobody else around our camp fire. We may doing some off-leashing… 🙂