Chilly times at the Soledad Canyon Thousand Trails Preserve

"Now let's just hope that whoever is running the place is very forgiving and that your parents aren't camping right now" says Meg to Mark. It had occurred to us that because Mark doesn't have his own TT membership number, if his parents were to go camping and use the number on a night we wanted to camp, we would probably get turned away, and his parents were thinking about camping. Anyway... We pull into the Thousand trails campground, across the railroad tracks. "Oh, no," says Mark, "Not the one with the railroad tracks!" I mentioned vaguely remembering the name of the preserve, Soledad Canyon, from our trip two years ago, but Mark remained convinced, or at least hopeful, that this was not the place where we were kept up all night by trains rolling by at all hours. A very official and somewhat disgruntled Thousand Trails gate-keeper steps out of the gate shack as we pull up, obviously put off by the fact that our car gets 23 miles to the gallon and there's no four ton trailer behind us. Mark gets out and gets it done. Soon we're off, as the guy says to us, "Stay warm," as if he knows that we're doomed to freeze!

On the way back and forth to the bathroom, our feet crunch over the frozen grass carpeting the ground. Yes, that was FROZEN grass. Soon our fingers and noses were joining the grass in this chilly state, but all was not lost. We boiled up some water and each of us slept in the company of a 200 degree nalgene bottle. Our bags kept us warm enough, and even the trains took pity on us, remaining quiet for most of the night.