On Sunday we finally made it to the campground that we couldn't get into last time due to bad weather. What is a campground? It's simply a place in the woods where you can pitch tents and build a campfire surrounded by beautiful nature. People head out camping on a Friday night or Saturday morning and come back on Sunday morning or evening. This particular campground had a rather flowery name — Kettle Moraine Southern Unit. I can only translate it loosely. It roughly means the "Southern part of the kettle moraine". A moraine is a massive trail left by a sliding glacier, and a kettle is a small depression in this trail, formed by a chunk of ice that broke off and later melted. There are a lot of these kettles in a moraine, hundreds and thousands of them, ranging in size from twenty meters in diameter and up. The southern part — this refers to the section of the forest that makes up the nature reserve. And it also serves as an administrative unit.
We left on Friday evening but it took us a while to get there, and we had to pitch our tents in the twilight. It took a long time because you have to be smart about using GPS — give it a more precise address, otherwise it doesn't always find what you need, especially if it's a tricky thing like a campground. Then again, some of the roads were blocked off due to floods.
To the barricades, everyone!
Campgrounds can be state-owned or private. State ones are located in nature reserves and cost less, while private ones sometimes offer more amenities. Campgrounds always have a restroom and water not far from your site, and there are often showers in a dedicated building. You can only build a fire using gathered brushwood; chopping and sawing wood is strictly prohibited. Another option is to buy firewood from the campground owners, though the prices are hardly encouraging — a few bucks per log. The campfire goes in a hefty concrete ring so the flames don't escape the clearing and start a wildfire.
At a campground, Americans do barbecue, which means grilling meat. It's probably easier than shashlik. Among other things, we tried some bison. Ignorant Americans (hoho, look how smoothly I slipped in that universally beloved cliché) call it a buffalo. While it is related to the bison, it's a distant relative. Probably everyone knows how Americans mindlessly slaughtered millions of bison, wiping them out both for fun and to harm the Native Americans, for whom it was the primary source of food. They only came to their senses when a pitiful few tens of thousands were left. Though nowadays they've bred them back up to a sufficient number, and these animals are no longer threatened.
American bison, aka Bison bison
But few people know that Europe had practically the exact same animal, only it's called a zubr. The zubr lived across vast expanses from England to Siberia, and the Europeans and Slavs exterminated it far more efficiently than the Americans did. There were no wild zubrs for several decades starting in 1921, until they began to be artificially bred and released back into the forests.
European bison (zubr), aka Bison bonasus
In short, a classic example of "the log in your own eye." Anyway, these days you can buy meat from a farmed bison and eat it. Taste-wise, it's like beef, but tougher. Nothing special. To be fair, I ate it frozen; they don't have fresh bison at Woodman's due to its high price and how little it differs from beef. They do say it's healthier, but you're better off buying vegetables for that kind of money.
Our clearing is further back behind the cars. And I was taking a picture of the rainbow.
And a bit more about food. As I've said before, there are a billion types of chips and other appetizers, called snacks, in America. At the campground I tried what are, in my opinion, terrible chips with vinegar. I generally dislike vinegar because of its harsh taste, just like I dislike the salty-glutamate taste of chips. And here, glutamate chips burn your mouth with vinegar — total nightmare.
Monosodium glutamate (Latin: monosodium glutamate, the monosodium salt of glutamic acid) is a food additive designed to enhance taste sensations by increasing the sensitivity of the tongue's taste buds.
It is a white crystalline powder that is highly soluble in water. Known to the Chinese as "flavor seasoning", to the Japanese as "miracle powder" ("ve-tsin"). The taste of glutamate is called "umami," which is one of the basic taste sensations known to humans. Monosodium glutamate is obtained both from natural resources and through chemical reactions.
By the way, an article in the Wall Street Journal solved the mystery of why American soups appeal to me. Turns out, they are a haven for glutamate too.
This is the rain tarp for the rain that finally started pouring down in the end.
On the flip side, the campground also had some awesome multigrain chips. They aren't as hellishly unhealthy as the "potato" ones, and most importantly, they have a fairly mild taste. By the way, I've always joked that all these artificial snacks we eat are made out of oil. As it turns out, you really can make food from it, but its composition will resemble meat more than chips. After significant processing, oil yields a protein mass that is useful for vegetarians and Africans, who constantly lack protein in their diets. It will probably be similar to soy, meaning it can be given different flavors using spices.
Psychedelia.
We also ate chips that I accidentally bought at Woodman's — dried pea pod on the outside and rice powder on the inside. Lena liked them so much that she bought more of them before the camping trip. Taste-wise they are, again, milder than "potato" ones. In general, they grow a crazy amount of corn in America, which is why a lot of snacks contain corn powder or high-fructose corn syrup, which I've written about before. Sadly, this kind of syrup has started appearing in our lemonades back home too, but they don't say what it's made from there. We dipped all these goodies into a dill dip I bought out of curiosity, making it all even tastier and even more unhealthy.