J's World

While visiting a college friend in Ohio earlier this month I decided to add a camping and fishing trip to my vacation agenda of concerts, ballgames and laziness. I have grown up camping and fishing in Alaska and thought it would be nice to spend a few days in a new set of woods and test my fishing abilities on a few new species of fish.

Besides, how different can camping in Ohio be?

Well, apparently very different, or at least in my experience.

Once the weekend started, my first thought and an overwhelming theme throughout the trip, was "Toto, we're not in Alaska anymore."

Going into the trip I did not know exactly what to expect. I assumed it would be an average camping trip. Hot dogs, fishing and someone throwing up in the campfire, like my old college friend Nate did a year before.

Nate is from Alaska, but his wife, Chris, and their friends are Ohioans-- born and bred. I quickly figured out that folks from Ohio have a little different idea of enjoying the great outdoors.

Our destination was Mosquito Lake, a body of water that was supposed to be stocked with walleye, crappie, bass and catfish in Northeast Ohio. Chris' Uncle Allen lived in the area and he was to hook us up with a few boats to troll around the lake. I figured he lived close to a nice campground. Worst case scenario we would end up at a KOA.

Once we got to Mosquito Lake I figured out there was a campground nearby, but our camp site was in Allen's backyard. I felt like I was warped back to 1985 and eight years old preparing for a sleepover in a friend's yard.

Like I said, I was not in Alaska anymore.

Rather than question the differences, I decided to pitch my tent and prepare for the camp fire feast. In mere minutes tents began popping up everywhere. While putting the rainfly over my tent, I looked back and saw Nate and Chris setting up two tents. I was not sure if they took a page from the Ward and June Cleaver theory on marital relations one step further. Are they a married couple with not only separate beds, but separate tents? While I do not normally take an interest in the sleeping practices of others, I did find it kind of strange.

Did I miss something? Is Nate in the doghouse?

Turns out that they are not a married couple that patterned their lives after television couples from the 50s and Nate was not exactly in the dog house.

He was setting up the dog house.

They brought a tent for their dog. Brings new meaning to the term, "puptent."

After our tent city was set up, it looked like there was a hippy commune in Allen's backyard. There were six tents behind the house and an old beat up trailer in the corner of the backyard. Throw in a stage and the area would have been a venue where the Grateful Dead would be proud to perform.

And I cannot forget the townhall of our tent city, a large canopy with netting on the sides to keep those mighty Ohio mosquitos off our feast.

Those dreaded bugs must have found another backyard campsite for the weekend. I think I spotted three bugs over two days. Not sure if there was a need for the netted monstrosity, but oh, well.

It was worth it just to watch Nate and Chris' friends, Erin and Austin set up the tent city's townhall.

It was like a pair of monkeys trying to crack the Rubicks cube.

Once the hippy commune was complete, the seven o'clock sun began to set and it was time for dinner.

Setting up a tent city does create quite the appetite.

At this point I was craving something off the grill. A juicy burger, steak or even a bratwurst would have hit the spot, but apparently a tradition among the campers of Northeastern Ohio is to order pizza.

Now this was feeling more and more like a weekend from my youth-- sleeping out in a friend's backyard and ordering pizza.

Add in balloons and a cake and it would be have been just like my ninth birthday.

And to make matters worse, Nate and I were volunteered to make the pizza run.

Apparently they do not deliver in Ohio.

This was just one of the many bright ideas on the camping trip. Send a pair of Alaskans with no sense of direction to a pizza place two towns over. I found that Northeast Ohio has a countless string of towns connected by neighboorhoods that looked exactly alike.

Before we ventured off to find this mystery pizza parlor, Allen gave us directions that were supposedly so simple, that we need not write them down.

Rather than giving us the names of streets, he gave us geographic locations to help us find our way.

Apparently Ohioans use fast food resturaunts as means for finding thier way around.

We were supposed to turn left at a BP gas station and the pizza joint would be right near a McDonald's and an

Arbys.

The part that Allen, the master navigator, left out was there is a BP at every corner and McDonald's and Arbys are not only everywhere in Ohio, but usually right next to each other.

I belive that the ratio of McDonald's to people in Ohio is 3 to 1. The phrase under the golden arches should read, "Over a billion served in Ohio alone."

It also didn't help that we forgot the name of the pizza place. So we stopped at the first place left of a BP and near a McDonald's and Arbys that had pizza. We thought we had finally found it, after a half hour of driving, but the folks in the pizza place didn't know who the hell we were. I told Nate just to stick the pizza in a white box and no one would know the difference, but he insisted on going on.

We drove for at least another hour, seeing half of Northeast Ohio. At one point we were just miles from the Pennsylvania border.

We traveled for nearly three hours that night looking for this phantom pizza place, wondering if this was just a cruel practical joke people from Ohio play on gullible Alaskans.

We saw every McDonald's, Arbys and BP in three different counties. At one point we even saw a McDonald's and BP in the same building, with an Arbys across the street.

Must have been Allen's holy grail.

We even tried to stop and ask for directions, at a BP, but the gas station attendant had just moved north from Georgia and knew even less about the area than we did.

You would figure that the deep, almost uncomprehendable southern accent would have tipped us off, but frustration and starvation began to cloud the mind.

Finally by a stroke of luck, just as the trip time hit three hours, we found the pizza place.

But unfortunately, they had closed about 20 minutes earlier.

Apparently waiting two hours for the pizza was just to long and Allen had gone too get the pizza about an hour earlier.

At that point we headed back to the hippy commune in Allen's backyard, hoping there would be at least a slice or two of this supposedly magnificent pie.

We finally returned to a group which included Nate's irritated wife and a group of people laughing at us.

And when we finally got a taste of this food we had searched out for three hours, we found the oddest pizza we had ever tried.

The pizza had no cheese.

Pizza with no cheese and a hippie commune -- I would have to say it is the most interesting day I have spent in the backyard of my friend's wife's uncle.

Jeremiah Bartz is the Frontiersman sports editor. This is the first in the series, "JB goes to Ohio." Bartz is writing these columns in hope that the Frontiersman will either shave off a few vacation days or accept some of the receipts from his trip for reimbursement.