Where does one of the youngest most traveled person in the world still travel to after they’ve been to nearly every country in the world?
Home, of course.
I’ve hitchhiked onboard trains through the endless expanse of The Sahel, slept in guesthouses in Bangladesh, and wolfed down horse plov in Uzbekistan. And yet somehow the NY Hudson Valley in the fall and spring, with its overcast skies, damp grass, the particular smell of campfire mixed with incoming rain, still calls to me every year.
I may not always blog about the thrice-yearly camping trips I organize for local monsooners who don’t always join on my international trips. But this one was different. I mean, I guess they all are, but that just means it’s hard to pick favorites.
By the numbers, this was our most attended camping yet: 19 people for the whole weekend + 15 more joining Sunday to turn into a 34 strong group of strangers and friends crammed into a Mongolian yurt that was booked for 28, at a farm with a 2-year waitlist, all in this 1 big run on sentence that’s already getting ahead of itself.
Our camping trips always starts at the campgrounds, where car by car and friend group by friend group arrive at their leisure and setting up our tents before the sun sets. We never do icebreakers and there is no agenda; a faith in an unspoken gravity always brings the right people together.
Once oriented, we head to what I always feel is the best part of any camping trip: the first provisions run. I love this part.
I know a supermarket isn’t what you expect as an ideal place for a meet-cute for a group of friends, but I always feel the air of a new adventure, even a familiar one, that allows new bonds in a grocery aisle to be a proving ground for authentically electric connections.
I enjoy witnessing different pockets of new friends intermingle and joust over quantities. Someone pulls a spice off the shelf nobody else has heard of (Slap Ya Mama, anyone?). Someone else starts the old debate about how much water 20 people actually need per day (The answer is 7.5 gallons per day).
There’s no better bonding exercise with strangers than negotiating real basic survival needs. Maslow maybe didn’t write specifically about the grocery store aisle, but he should have.
After half an hour we pay and head out into dusk.
Back at the campsite, unloading onto the picnic tables (always get a campsite with a table; you don’t appreciate raised flat surfaces until they don’t exist) something remarkable always happens when on a monsoon: Without any formalities within 20 minutes the campfire was started, the grill was figured out, the firewood retrieved, the meal prep underway, cocktail recipes being improvised, seasoning tossed back and forth. Someone found the charcoal. Someone wrapped the vegetables in foil. Some got the grill grate on the fire pit. Someone else figured out the optimal Asian squat position for tending it.
All of this — the drinks, warmth, burgers and hot dogs — came together like a symphony.
I then scaled up my pyramid of needs with creative liberties on dining: We went from lettuce burgers to Bagel burgers. I regret nothing.
We then tossed fire coloring powder into the campfire and watched it sprak green and blue to a chorus of genuine, unironic oohs and aahs.
A wild Yuhan soon appeared from nowhere with a birthday cake for Jenny that she’d quietly smuggled into our provisions run. The group then cracked out tin foil as makeshift plates for our rapidly melting ice cream cake.
We stayed up late under a sky full of stars.
As the night cooled, people split off into smaller campfires by their tents, especially the first-timers, who were beginning to learn that camping is mostly an effort at increasingly creative ways to stay warm.
We woke up the next morning to instant and Moka pot coffee, scrambled eggs, and sugar-coated bacon on the grill. We appreciated the delicious way how sugar caramelizes in the fat. If you haven’t made one yourself, you’re missing something.
After our lazy breakfast we drove out to Soons Orchard for locally farmed produce that included popcorn, blueberry and apple pies, celery for Uriah specifically (don’t ask, but we did), portobello mushrooms, sweet potatoes, brussels sprouts, and corn.
Then to Angry Orchard for ciders, food truck lunch, and live outdoor music.
Before sunset, we drove to the local ShopRite for final provisions where, by pure coincidence, we ran directly into the other half of our group who’d had the same idea at the same time. You can’t plan something like that, though: You can only be the type of group that these things always happen to, which for monsooners, is quite often.
We then reconvened for one more night of dinner around the campfire.
The second night’s dinner was more ambitious: corn on the cob, sweet potatoes, more burgers, sausages, vegetable skewers, grilled mushrooms, and strawberry gin mojitos. Slap Ya Mama made a highly requested return appearance.
Then someone mentioned if this camping trip feels it may have had already happened.
And we were off.
Spirituality sublimated into the non-linearity of time. Then if there’s life after death to the concept of God and love. Defining consciousness. What makes us exquisitely, frustratingly human. The cube and wall-in-the-desert personality tests. We wondered what would life be if sleep didn’t exist; would it be any different from death? Our campfire conversations formed this uncanny alternate pocket universe of 15 strangers finding themselves together under millennia-old stars that for once have nowhere they have to be, whether they be strangers or the stars themselves (is there a difference?).
I then narrated The Egg by Andy Weir after it was recommended by a new friend the week before, and after a weekend like this, the poem felt like its unscheduled appearance felt almost too on the nose.
Maybe by virtue of quantum physics, this has already happened.
We know that a feeling that something is happening doesn’t mean it actually is. But what if it wasn’t a feeling this time? What if it was intuition?
We then retreated to our tents eventually, chased there partly by spider bites.
We woke up to a warm 83°F Sunday morning. Breakfast again, then packing, then the campsite auction; leftover provisions freely sold to whoever was willing to carry them home. Leave no trace behind.
Once fully clearing the campsite and tying up the trash for disposal, we drove 17 minutes towards New Paltz for the grand finale: a sesame crusted roasted lamb experience at Bobo’s Farm, which has a waitlist spanning over 2 years.
And waiting for us were 15 more people, friends who’d passed on camping but not on this. The reservation had been made 5 months in advance and after numerous warm, firm, texts in Mandarin, they’d agreed to fit 33 people into a space meant for 28. I’m not sure what the Mandarin word for “we’re all small people and have shared small spaces before” is, but whatever we wrote apparently worked.
We toured the farm first as we waited for our lamb get prepared.
We saw where it had been marinating for 22-24 hours, rubbed in spice paste, crusted in sesame seeds, and slow-roasted into a traditional, in-ground pit oven, often referred to as a yao.
It slow-roasts underground for about 2 hours until the skin gets crispy and the meat becomes tender enough to dissolve in your mouth.
And for the next 2–3 hours I watched various monsoon groups reunite, meet for the first time, and catch up over old times since adventures past.
By 1:45pm we were seated inside the yurt.
As the conversations dimmed down, we awaited our pre-ordered 17 dishes that included our whole roasted lamb, stewed goose, beer-braised duck, iron pot fish, pork ribs, sauerkraut pork belly, Sichuan bacon, cucumber salad, black fungus, cold cut beef, pig’s ear, jelly noodle salad, spicy cabbage, Donbei pork (2 orders!) and minced pork with pickled long beans.
The endeavor to determine if we ordered enough already made me feel full.
And by 2pm the lamb was lifted out of the ovens and presented:
The meal afterwards became a harrowing array of those aforementioned 17 dishes that came at us fast and furious. We tried to fit them all on our soggy paper plates, and when we got hungry again, we ate some more. Some of us dissected the lamb to the bone. Stripped out eyeballs and found the spinal cord; we engaged a type of feral eating you only really do when you’re in a once-in-a-lifetime eating experience in northwest China, or apparently, in a yurt in the Hudson Valley on a Sunday afternoon.
And through the blur of it all, by 3:40pm it was all over:
I’ve had monsoon weekends around the world. And then I have them here. You can spend months organizing carpools, tent assignments, dish votes and Mandarin negotiations with a farm boasting a 2-year-waitlist. You account for everyone’s dietary restrictions, who needs a ride, and whether the yurt you never been to truly fits 33 people if they’re all willing to sit close.
And then it’s all over in a flash, and you’re driving home late Sunday evening wondering how to describe, let alone hold onto something that was never supposed to be put into words, or last.
As others returned home, 8 of us lingered behind; we drove to Poughkeepsie, checked out Lauren’s apartment in her last year of emergency medicine residency, and took an elevator up the Walkway Over the Hudson for views over the river. Just one more small side quest and a few more hours before the weekend would become another memory.
On the drive back, I thought about what actually makes weekends like this flow so effortlessly. Sure you still need to work on the logistics as if they were the ingredients to a roasted lamb recipe. But you also need the yurt and yao, or the fire coloring or even the grocery store debate about water quantities. It’s mainly the little things; there’s nothing bigger.
But what then brings all of the components together was a very act of letting go at the right moments and beholding the process: that everything unfolds when nobody needed to be told what to do. 20 strangers and friends showed up and naturally found their roles not from assignment, but because that’s what happens when you put the right people together in conditions where survival requires cooperation and comfort requires creativity.
For either possibility, you can’t perform or manufacture that. You can only build the conditions and then get out of the way.
One of the people on the trip, a future author, published something about the weekend afterward. She wrote about the campfire conversation, about faith and meaning, about watching someone move through the world with joy in bringing people together and how it reminded her she still has that in her somewhere. That she worried her discernment was calcifying into cynicism. That she wanted to believe cynicism wasn’t inevitable.
It stirred something within me.
Because the honest answer is that I’m not always aware of the joy she described. Sometimes I can get lost in an emotion of logistics. But then 20 people show up and find their roles without being asked, and someone whom I’m just getting to know publishes something about a campfire conversation I thought had vanished into the night, and I remember.
We all have “it” in us. We all have the potential for it to become “that.” Both are true at the same time, often in the same person, sometimes in the same weekend.
I’ve been to 192 countries. I’ve organized trips on all 7 continents for thousands of strangers. And I still don’t fully understand why a campfire 2 hours away from home in New York state, under stars, surrounded by people who found their roles without being asked, resonates the way it does.
Maybe I don’t need to.
Maybe this has already happened.
Sure feels like it has.
See you at the next one.
- At time of posting in Montgomery, NY, it was 23 °C - Humidity: 72% | Wind Speed: 13km/hr | Cloud Cover: clear, warm, and it just got better and better
