Island Anticipation

Yaaaaaaaayyyy, it is finally time for the camping trip to Santa Rosa Island! Busy, busy, busy little bee, is me. I am sooooo ready to hang out on an island for a few days! We have planned, shopped and packed and I am practically on pins and needles looking forward to getting started. Channel Islands, here I come! =o)

Originally we had talked about going down and hanging out for the whole weekend, but the memorial service for my friend is Saturday morning. So, instead, we are heading down to Ventura on Sunday, playing tourists a bit during the day, having dinner and attempting to get to bed early and get a good nights sleep. It is too long a drive to try to head out from here the morning of the boat trip, since we need to be down at the harbor by about 6:30 Monday morning to load the camping gear on the boat.

We are going backpacking style, except for food and beverage cooler, because it's about 1.5 miles from the pier to the campgrounds, so the lighter the better. It was rather fun to get some new gear for the trip. Although I have plenty of camping gear, I didn't really have the right stuff for camping "lite". So a whirlwind shopping spree at the local mountaineer store produced a new backpacking pack, a new condensed sleeping bag, a good sleeping pad and a few other random items. Not a cheap excursion, but worth every penny, in my opinion. It is both thrilling and a tiny bit scary to think about living out of a back pack, being that I will also be on a small island without access to pretty much anything, but it is only for 3 days, and soooo totally cool!

It takes about 3 hours to get from Ventura Harbor to Santa Rosa Island and I believe there is brief stop on Santa Cruz Island first, if it happens to be any sunnier this trip, it would be lovely to get some better shots of the seascape surrounding the islands. Pretty excited at just the joy of being on a boat heading for a great trip and the planned breakfast with mimosa's we'll be partaking in with the 18 other people in our group that we are meeting up with at the harbor! :) Delightful!

I'll come back with lots of photo's to share and perhaps a good story or two to tell. =o)