Chapter 324

I woke up around 9, the girlfriend was already up and just came back from walking the dog. It was really sunny and quite warm, she proposed we go camping. Hmmm, why not, we’d been talking about that for a while. We packed our bags and plastic crates, stuffed it all in the car, and headed out. I drove about an hour on the highway, then we got to the shores of Tai Lake, a huge body of water a bit inland, west of Shanghai.

We slowly cruised, the road was usually too close to the lake to allow for some good camping spots, and most of the shores were either swampy or occupied by touristy parks. So we kept going, on the lookout for something suitable. I saw stairs going down towards the water and it led to a decent enough spot, but with too much of a tree cover, which would be nice in summer but now we’re looking for sun exposure. We shortlisted it, marking it on the GPS.

The girlfriend proposed a spot, but it seemed to me that the police or rent-a-cops would come and tell us to fuck off at nightfall. I was more interested by a quiet area up a hill in the clearing of a tea field, but it was a bit cramped. We talked to a couple eating their homemade hotpot lunch by their RV with their three dogs, and they suggested we go back to the spot the girlfriend initially came up with, as there are sometimes people camping in tents there and don’t get bothered. Sold.

We set up the tent, and sat down enjoying the view. I cracked open a beer, a pretty tasty white from a Chinese brewery called Bairenbahe, and then went to a pier nearby where an old man was fishing, inflated my boat, and put it in the water. I went down the stone stairs and slid badly on the last step, which was covered with slimy algae, and fell hard on my ass. It could have been much worse though, I was mostly mad about getting wet and getting the dog wet. I paddled a bit, the dog curiously staring at the horizon, and alighted at another pier from which I walked back to our camp.

I changed into comfy warm clothes, read a few chapters, then started making dinner. I lit our little propane stove, dumped a cooked chicken breast, a tuna can and a green peas can in a pot, and we ate that tasty mixture with a tortilla filled with cream cheese. I also had a Delirium Tremens beer, and its 8.5% alcohol content knocked me hard, I don’t drink much these days and get inebriated much quicker. Cost efficiency.

The girlfriend was cold so she went in the tent, I stayed up reading a bit and then joined her. We brought the parchési table and played a game, which I won by a tiny margin. Then I went to sleep, though it was barely 8 PM.