The Patio Boys take a winter trip, find geodes, eat barbeque and pass through the rarified air of the town that inspired a little ditty about Jackie and Dianne 

By Captain

Let it be disclosed that the Patio Boys do not always sleep in the woods.

More precisely, we do not always backpack into the woods and sleep in a tent. Three times a year at least, we car camp, and at least once a year we arrange for a cabin, preferably one with a hot tub, HDTV, a microwave and beds with boxsprings and clean sheets. 

How is it possible, you must be wondering, for such exemplars of the backpacking arts to be routinely reliant on the amenities of car and cabin camping? We offer no defense beyond our name: We are the Patio Boys, not the original cast of “127 Hours” or a the spawn of Jon Krakauers interbred with the gene pool of Sebastian Junger. Memo to the elite, extreme adventure set. We aren't you. 

Nor are we ultralight hikers, who drill holes in the handles of our toothbushes and weigh our dried soy beans on a postal scale. We travel with enough camp stoves to equip a Bobby Flay throwdown. We bring iPod docks with spare batteries, 20-ounce bottles of Pepsi One as a mixer, and folding camp chairs, even on 25-mile hikes. There is a reason why Silver Pops' pack weighs 57 pounds, and it is not because he left all the comforts of home behind. You have to be man enough to bear this kind of burden. A group that welcomes Frenchie with his French press and custom bean grinder, his titanium cot and his Winnebago-sized tent is not a group adverse to comfort. So no one should be shocked to learn that we sometimes camp with more than a sheet of low-denier nylon between us and God.  We even camp sometimes with a roof over our head, and find it agrees with us. 

It works like this:

·      The Spring and Fall Trips. There is a well-established routine tor these excursions, each of which begins with car camping. We arrive  on a Friday as the day fades into evening. We retire comfortably to a campground with designated lots laid out beside assignd parking spots each a yard dart's throw from its respective tent site, fire pit and picnic table. At such places, we are not averse to communal indoor plumbing, although the practice of installing only a cold shower in the public facilities strikes as a waste of Kohler's excellent products and another example of taxation without representation. At these places, we buy firewood, grill steaks, drink bottled beer and otherwise behave almost as if we were at home on our patios. The next morning, we load up our backpacks and start walking.

·         The Winter Trip. I'll go into more detail later but a winter trip's parameters are one night at a campground with the fellows, followed by one night in a cabin, joined by our wives. Backpacks stay home for the winter trips..

No matter the season, our trips start the same way. We gather in the neighborhood, usually arriving in twelve different cars, each packed to capacity with camping gear, and then we transfer what fits into the two or three cars that are actually going on the trip. Soccer mom vans are much appreciated at this stage of the game. SUVs with roof racks are a close second. Goetzy's Prius is a challenge.

We depart beautiful downtown Crescent Springs. Ye shall know it by the confluence of  all things suburban at the corner of Anderson and Buttermilk: two gas stations, three banks, two drugs stores and a LaRossa's Pizza, all governed by an intricate system of  synchronized traffic signals that control access to the respective businesses as well as to your ability to leave town. These regulatory implements are required by the Order of the Universe, as set out biblically or perhaps by the Pope. In any case, they are by divine dictate. I deduce this because there is no other explanation for this much government heavy-handedness in town with aknown phobia of Big Government. Our citizens oppose government-mandated health care, government-mandated support of people left unemployed by the recession (particularly if those people lost jobs paying less than $80,000 a year) and government-mandated limits on weaponry, including Glocks and iPhones that can be used while driving. The one expression of Big Government that we not only tolerate but invite is Planning and Zoning, because only those guys have the foresight to create throughway intersections that are so distinctively suburban as to guarantee that any aliens who land from Mars or planets beyond will, upon seeing our redundant providers, know without doubt they are not within the boundaries of a urban municipality. Here, the aliens will find a grid of streets named for the daughters of various German immigrants who found profitable enterprise in America as homebuilders, and so constructed neighborhoods where the patios are exceeded in opulance only by the man caves.  Footnote: Once the Germans ran out daughter names for their streets they did things like bulldoze an apple orchard and build a neighborhood called "The Orchard" with streets named for the variety of apples that used to be there, McIntosh, Winesap, etc. Is that creative or what? Joni Mitchell should write a song. 

Such is the world we leave behind in favor of trails named not for the nubile daughters of Germans fresh from the Old Country but for Indians. Kanati Fork, Oconaluftee or the more obvious Indian Creek preseve on trail signs the legacy of native tribes pushed westward to reservations by another generation of European immigrants, not all of whom were German.

Winter trips differ markedly once we are out of Crescent Springs, with distance and destination being among the distinctions. For the spring and fall trips, we proceed south – always south – down Interstate 75, passing through hallowed Lexington, home of the University of Kentucky basketball team (there may also be a college there) and Keeneland, where, with apologies to the Everly Brothers who credited this phenomenon to Bowling Green, has the prettiest girls you've every seen and who wear their dresses cut all country tight. 

The drive further south to is sufficiently long as to prohibit backpacking into the woods immediately upon arrival. Hence, a night of car camping comes first. We set up tents at last 10 yards from the cars, then go to town for sustenance unless we are in a dry county, in which case we stay put and rely on our provisions. Come sunup, we put on our backpacks and venture forth for two nights into territory so wild that cell phone service is spotty, especially if you don’t have Verizon.

There are ample stories on this website about the spring and all trips, which are the guts of a Patio Boy Experience. What follows is a rare look at a Winter Trip. I've been on two, but this year was my first authentic version. Last year, we sort of cheated, going to a campground barely an hour from home, buying firewood at a gas station, leaving camp by car to take our meals at a local diner and even catching some NCAA basketball games on the diner's pitiful excuss for a television. As boys, we watched "Lassie" on a similar TV.

This year, in contrast, we followed The Plan: night one, car camping, night two, a cabin. SOP for a winter trip.

The trip was to the Charles C. Deam Wilderness, which is notably located in the middle of nowhere except that it isn't too far from Seymour, where there must be some little pink houses since Seymour is the home of John Cougar Mellenkamp. We didn't stop but we did have to listen to Bob garble some lines to a little ditty about Jackie and Dianne, two American kids growing up in the heatland, sung to a tune remarkably similar to the orginal.

The Dean Wilderness also is near the Scenic View, a restaurant burdened with a name in which it adjective is synonymous with its noun, like Freezing Cold or Snow White or Fast Porsche or Slow Turtle or Ugly Betty. The difference is, freezing is cold, snow is white, Porsches are fast, turtles are slow and Betty is ugly. The Scenic View has a view of the highway. It also has a $5 bowl of chili that costs more like $7. The saving grace (there again, an adjective not working too hard, given that grace saves prima facie, does it not?) at the Scenic View was the waitress, who wasn't Ugly Betty and had only moderate tattoos. Maybe she was the scenic view.

We lunched at the Scenic View before heading into the Deam Wilderness, but didn't keep going back after we pitched our tent. So this was more like real, actual camping -- the kind campers do.

We got street cred (or is it trail cred?) because of  the choice of our destination, too. The Deam Wilderness is sufficiently acceptable as a backpacking destination to warrant a social media discussion on Backpacker.com, which is how all great wildness adventures are discovered these days, I guess. Patioboys.com notwithstanding, we are not a social media savvy hiking group ourselves. If you doubt that, check out our discussions page. Dead air. We make no apologies for this. After all, our spiritual founder of the Patio Boys, Daniel Boone, did not discover Kaintukee by going to www.shawnee.com. He did what we do. He told his wife, "See you Monday. I'm going hiking." He stayed a couple of years and when he came back he had more kids, but that's another story.

What you  find upon arriving at the Deam Wilderness is a nice logging road that meanders through a woods that apparently was logged out. I say this because the woods in this wilderness are made up of small trees, most of which seem to have been seedlings 30 or 40 years ago max. Mostly, it would seem, this land was settled and farmed by families who scratched out a living and, as evidenced by the tombstones at the terminus of one trail, often lost loved ones very young, even into the 20th century. So maybe it isn't a logging road; maybe it is just a road used by those few families to get back and forth from their land to town, where they bought supplies from little pink general stores called Store Shops.

The road in, whether it was historically a farm road, a logging road or both, is now a gravel road, well-maintained enough to draw local partiers, who toss their beer bottles along the side. Bud Light is the favored beer in these parts, although Coors and Miller are popular as well, as is Mountain Dew. This road leads to the Hickory Grove trailhead, where a nice old fire tower rises above the hillocks of south central Indiana. We took the Hickory Grove trail back to a small family cemetery, where the history of this place was sometimes heartbreaking. One family lost three daughters in the space of a few months, all of them young children, and a fourth a year later. What was it about this place that was so hard on them? Did an epidemic pass through? Or was there some small illness that worsened in the backwoods, too far from proper medical care?

We left there, three of us – Bob, McG and me – so we could connect with Ank, who was due to arrive at 4 p.m. Back at the tower, we climbed it, find the requisite graffiti scratched into the paint ... Jackie loves Dianne, etc., etc. And, interestingly, we could see smoke off in the distance, as if we had actually spotted a forest fire. It probably was the Scenic View, making chili.

One of the features of the Deam Wilderness is a covered wagon concession. It is hard to imagine this as a prosperous endeavor, but it appeared that the one wagon made repeated and scheduled runs on the Forest Service Road throughout business hours. If you had the bad luck to end up behind this wagon, which we did, your progress was slowed to the pace of a draft horse. The wagon turns around at the campground on the front end of the forest, which is where we settled down for the night.

This campground has all the charm of a suburban backyard, that is, if the suburban backyard smelled like manure – or as Mark Twain called it, recycled hay. The reason for this odor is that the Deam Wilderness is open to horseback riders, so horsemen arrive with their camper/trailers and camp here, tying up their horses overnight to the posts provided for that purpose. Very nice for the horsemen. As for us, it worked. It was a little like checking in for the night at a manger – but it's not like others haven't had to do that.

On a flat, grassy expanse we pitched our four tents and set about to gather a night's worth of firewood. The sky was clear, the temperatures mild and Ank brought us steaks, along with a small charcoal grill. We ate as if we were at the Precinct, which is, for those who don't know, a very nice steakhouse in Cincinnati where people who own Mercedes Benz's frequently dine. After dinner, the stories began and the lasted into the night. Women were talked about fondly, as was college basketball. There was enough material there for six hours of conversation and there was enough firewood to sustain that as well. I would tell you more about the evening's dialogue, but, as it has been throughout all history with one notable exception, what happens in the manger stays in the manger. Somewhere about 3 a.m., it began to rain and sleet, and turn cold. We woke up to a drizzle, but the Deam Wilderness has a picnic shelter, to which we retired for a breakfast of goetta, eggs, hash browns and sweet rolls, plus coffee and orange juice. Luxurious living.

And then we hiked, because it is what we do. This wilderness is laced with looping, loping trails, each in the neighborhood of four or five miles. We picked one and headed off. McG's iPhone rang. It was a tech from India telling him about a network glitch in Fort Thomas, and seeking McG's expertise in solving this, which he did, from Indiana. India/Indiana. Almost poetic, isn't it? The trail was nice if unremarkable, and up to a point well-marked. And then it wasn't. So we wondered into a piney woods that reminded you of the deeper forests in children's stories where things go bad. In our case, no one got hurt but in short order we were beside a sign that said, "Wilderness Boundary." So, arriving at private land, it was obvious we were not where we intended to be. What to do next? Bushwhack, of course. Off we went, following Bob's nose or gut or instinct or whatever. By my observation, we seemed to be going in a circle back to whence we came, but I am no expert in locations so suffice it to say that eventually we arrived back on the Forest Service Road after crossing the same creek 27 times. The creek bed was littered with geodes, which intrigued us, and prompted McG to load a few into his backpack and, therefore, often deliver this line: "Man, my pack is heavy. It feels like a load of rocks."

We were guided by Ank's vintage GPS, which was designed personally by Thomas Edison. Like the incandescent light bulb, it still works, though it weighs as much as a geode. The GPS got us back on course and back to the campground for humans and horses, where we shuttled back to our dropped car, called the ladies, and set off for our cabin in Brown County, not far outside Nashville -- not the Nashville with Johnn Cash; the Nashville trying to relieve you of your cash.

We passed through Nashville, where the shops were shut down for the night but still looked quaint and attractive to a certain kind of tourist, and we proceeded on according to our directions into the backside of Nashville, where zoning laws don't apply, resulting in house trailers resting on cinder blocks next to long, winding driveways with iron gates out front attached to masonry inscribed with last names proclaiming the inhabitants' wealth. "SMITH" must have made it big in Indy and so took himself a second home two blocks from the Nashville salt sheds, which we passed on the way to our Shrangi-La, which was marked by a green rectangle road sign – the same kind that typically is used as an interstate mile marker. Ours said "1538" – an unceremonious but practical welcome.

We arrived in a drenching rain, unpacked and hustled inside, smelling of campfires and sweat, to await our ladies. They arrived soon afterward, dressed elegantly casual in the kind of jeans you could wear to a Travis Tritt concert. Who is Travis Tritt, by the way? They smelled better than us.

Dinner would be pork barbeque, which I had prepped at home this way: place a cast iron skillet in the center of a Weber grill and fill the skillet with apple cider. Start some charcoal, including some mesquite and hickory. When it's lit and starting to turn white, spread it evenly around the circumference of the skillet. Place the grill's grid on its angle braces, and atop that, a five pound pork butt that you have liberally seasoned with salt, pepper, paprika and certain top secret other seasonings. If you are ever in Cincinnati, I recommend the spice shop at Findlay Market as the best place to acquire top secret seasonings. I'll say no more. Next, place the top on the Weber, leaving the vents open. Go inside and listen to Jimi Hendrix, the BBC recordings, both discs. Fall asleep and in the morning remove the pork butt and wrap it in foil for transport. At the cabin, and with help from Jenny and Brenda, neither of whom would touch the butt directly, I pulled the pork as they warmed the sauce, adding honey, paprika, a bit of bourbon and some Louisiana hot sauce to two bottles of Sweet Baby Ray's. After a 30 minute simmer, dinner was served.

Fun and games followed, including a timed version of charades, during which Brenda famously cheated, admitting as much the next day. By running up her score, she won ... let's see, what did she win? A night in the hot tub with her husband, I believe. If that is the case, I am here to say: I'm very, very glad I did not win.

Next morning, breakfast was French toast made with slices of sough dough bread, hashbrowns, fruit, goetta, eggs, yogurt, tea, coffee and juice. No one left the table hungry.

And then it was off to Nashville to shop. Lots of foo-foo is for sale. Nicely printed throw pillows, jewelry made of silver and gems, dried flowers, dolls kids cannot play with, and so on. A couple of shops had entertaining t-shirts, most of them with bad jokes about beer or men's balls or being proudly old. You might conclude that a lot of retirees shop in this town, and they are intolerant of the arrogance of youth. There was a really nice hat store with Stetsons and Authentic Tilleys. They also sold knockoff Tilleys for half price. You'd think the Tilley police would forbid that. Apparently not.

Eventually, McG and I found a coffee shop, where the Havana roast was especially dark and two pretty women waited on everyone, although a cantankerous middle-aged man who owned the joint came out and bitched if you walked in with a wet umbrella (on a rainy day at least, a wet umbrella is like Scenic View). He did this when our wives walked in, which really should have been cause to leave without paying. He was concerned water might drip onto his rustic wood floors. Damn. Wouldn't want that to happen.

He did, however, sell very good coffee and his place has, as best we could tell, the only two public restrooms in all of downtown Nashville. Those alone were worth the price of a cup of coffee. He also had free newspapers, although the Indiana papers don't seem to understand the importance of Kentucky basketball. Our loss to Arkansas in overtime was a brief story by the Associated Press. Holy Hooiser, Batman, does Bobby Knight own the newspapers in this flat-ass, indistinct state? At least give a quote from Coach Cal.

And that was that. We went back to the cabin, packed up and headed home, the rain still coming down in buckets.