It’s not so bad getting stuck here as it is hands down the nicest camping spot I’ve been at so far. I’m at the middle fork of the American river, there are only six basic campsites and a drop toilet. I’ve managed to arrange a lift out of here with Buffy who is camping in the spot next to me. She introduced herself to me last night. She’s quit her job and decided to wing it for a while out here with her pick-up, black Labrador and tent.

You meet some strange people in these sorts of campsites. Take for instance Vic, the guy camping on the other side of me. He introduced himself to me with the comment “You meet some pretty strange people in these campsites”. He said he had to meet me, he had to meet someone who had somehow managed to minimise his need for things in life so that he could fit it onto a bicycle.

He was living out of the back of his pick-up and had been down here for a few weeks. The 4-wheel drive on his pick-up wasn’t working so he was kind of stuck down here too.

Vic was a cartoonist and it seemed to give him a large amount of pleasure to show me his caricature of the gun toting female park ranger who collects the camping fees every afternoon. Vic avoids eye contact until he’s finished the punch line of his jokes and then he stares straight into your eyes with an evil-looking distorted excuse-for-a-grin. Buffy thinks he may have ingested a few too many illicit substances in the ‘60s and he’s now trying his best to avoid society by haunting campsites for a living. Vic’s eyes glaze over when he tells me how the river slows down time.

“Your place or hers?”, he says pointing to Buffy’s campsite before he wanders back to his pickup to grab the gin. Ten minutes later he wanders back with a cold beer for Buffy and himself, and rum in a ketchup squeezey bottle plus a lemonade for me. We drink and talk, Vic is a real character and has had an interesting odd-jobs sort of life. At times Buffy and I worryingly look at each as Vic seems almost ready to cry into his hands while he’s telling what appears to be a funny story. He later wanders back to his pickup after we’ve spent the last hour trying to pick out constellations in a night sky that is unrecognisable for a southern hemispherian like me.

Its apparent panic, seemed exactly like the kind of comic reaction I’d expect a person would make when seeing a brown bear for the first time. The campgrounds are completely empty except for a bunch of kids over the hill in the group campsite making a hell of a racket.

Last night it was warm enough to sleep without the fly of my tent. I woke in the night to the sound of a large animal walking past my tent.

It disappeared pretty quickly as I fumbled for my flashlight. I fell asleep again but within 15 minutes I was awakened by the group of kids screaming out from over the hill.