This is the Kind of Night You Dream of Truck Camping

There's an In-N-Out burger about an hour south from where I live, and any time that I'm headed south on a trip, without question, I'm stopping there. Unless the line is just absolutely crazy, which a lot of the time it is. Other than that, without a doubt, I am stopping at that In-N-Out like I just did for lunch. Wow, check out all this yellowish orange shrubbery on the hillside here. If you didn't know any better, you'd think we're in the middle of fall. Dam. No, literally, it's a dam. It's a big ol' dam. Big Cliff Dam and Lake. Kind of have a love-hate relationship with summer, because on the one hand, it's great having nice, warm, beautiful weather, long days, plenty of sunshine. But on the other hand, you can't escape the crowds. Middle of the week, every day, doesn't matter. There's going to be crowds in most of these spots. You're not going to find peace and serenity unless you get further into the backcountry. slowly but surely. See that peak over there in the distance? That looks like the Matterhorn. That is actually Mount Washington, if I'm not mistaken. Pretty cool peak. Seriously looks like the Matterhorn. This is definitely the most dicey road that I've driven on with the cabin. There's some pretty off-cambered sections, and as you can imagine, the cabin sticks up quite high in the air, and it's very top-heavy. So tipping over at an angle like that, it's sketchy. It doesn't feel right, that's for sure. But there's no turning back now, so we're just going to have to hope that we make it all the way to the spot. All right, so I just found what might be the most epic spot that I've spent so far in the cabin, but the only problem is to get down there, I've got to drive over that, which probably doesn't look like too much on camera, and it might not be, but when you've got a giant camper on the back of your truck, a literal tiny house makes things dicier, that's for sure. I guess we're just going to send it and hope for the best, right? Well folks, talk about the perfect spot. We got the rig right there, and then 10 feet over to this side, we have this beautiful small lake with views all around. There goes Kaia announcing to all the fish that we have arrived. We're here fish, we're here to catch you. Don't run away, there's nothing to fear. This dog loves water, look at her. All right, I'm going to go ahead and just assess the damage here in the back of the cabin. I know things were flying out, they had to have been. We'll see if anything broke though, that's really what I'm concerned about. Everything from the cabinet looks to have bounced out, the drawer flung open, stuff flew over there on the countertop. You know what though? I don't think anything's broken. That's good, yeah. Doesn't look like anything broke. There's some spilt pasta there. Oh, a lot of spilt pasta. Not horrible though, not horrible. This bottle of oyster sauce survived the off-roading, but it turns out you barely nick it on a bottle while putting it away and the whole thing explodes and spills all over everything. That's lovely. Unbelievable. How did it survive falling out of the freaking cabinet? But anyways, life will go on, it's all good. Well, ran out of paper towels, but thankfully I have these huggies for just this purpose. Cleaning up spilled oyster sauce, nothing else. No beer today, right now I'm drinking a Grape Aid Spindrift. All right, now that's cleaned up in here, now we can chill out. Gonna go on a little walk right now and let Kaya get some wiggles out before I pump up the paddle board and get onto the lake. Now if you're wondering why I'm wearing a raincoat when clearly no clouds in the sky, the mosquitoes, as I kind of predicted, are absolutely terrible here and I think it's only going to get worse as we get closer to sunset. Unfortunately, mosquitoes love these smaller lakes like this and we're right next to this little stream that feeds the lake, so that's a double whammy. The raincoat helps though, that's for sure. What's it looking like over here? Wow, this is a nice spot too. Nice and flat, shaded. The funny thing is, this spot is just right off the road, not a rough step down to get to the spot like it was to get to our spot. Lake right there. Man, this would have been a contender for sure. Oh well, not moving now. It's freaking hot in this raincoat, but I can't take it off. As soon as I take it off, the mosquitoes just swarm instantly, so it's got to stay on unfortunately. Well, the road just turns into this giant puddle or mini lake here, so I can't really continue on without getting my boots all soaked. Oh well. Kyle, let's go. Come on. There must have been a bunch of snow here that recently melted, I'm guessing, which would explain the giant puddles. I doubt this is from rain. Surprisingly, Kaya has not yet went paddleboarding, so today's actually not going to be the day. Unfortunately, she's just going to stay in the cabin while I go do a little bit of paddling. Of course, when leaving the dog in the cabin by herself, she has access to fresh water, and she's got airflow, and it's really nice in here actually. It's not warm at all. You get the ball. You're patiently waiting for me. Well, I think it's time that I fire up the tequila grill because that's what I'm going to be making my dinner on tonight. Battle of the pop-up fire pits with the one that I used in last week's video. Move the fire pit a little bit over here to the side just to create a bit more space between the fire and the wood cabin. Probably would have been fine there where it was, but you can never be too safe with those types of things. All right, we're going to have to hit pause on dinner here because I was just looking out over the lake, and there are fish jumping on the surface, eating flies or some sort of insect right off the surface, so I'm going to rig up my fly rod. I'm going to take the paddleboard, and I'm going to go out there for a little bit, see if we can catch one on the fly. That would be sick. Don't got much time. Still want to cook before it gets dark, so you got to hurry it up here. I'll see you guys out on the water. Tonight for dinner, I'm going to make some chicken yakitori, which is a grilled chicken skewer dish. I'm going to make those right on the tequila grill, and those all get dipped in what's called a tare sauce. A tare sauce is a mirin, soy, sake sauce that the skewers will get dipped in, and then they get grilled with that sauce on them, and it's going to be phenomenal. I can hardly wait. Right now, I'm in the cabin. I'm going to make the tare sauce, the dipping sauce, and the fire should be ready pretty soon now. It looks like we're going to have some good coals, which is exactly what we're going for. First, we've got the sake. Now, we've got mirin, soy sauce, sugar. This is just a couple green onions, just the green part. Goes right into there. Got some dried shiitake mushroom. Last but not least, we got this kombu, which is like a dried kelp. It's a dried kelp variety. I'm just going to go ahead and give that a stir now. We're going to have to heat this up over the fire, but for now, I'm just going to stir that all up, and we'll get to preparing the skewers real quick. This is a leek, and I'm going to be grilling some of these up. A little bit of oil with those leeks. I'm going to use a little bit of soy sauce. Maybe a little of that mirin here. Next, we've got these shishito peppers. The only kind that I could find were in this kit with a seasoning and stuff, but honestly, the seasoning sounds pretty good. I might just use it. It's a sesame soy, so why not? That's literally just soy sauce and sesame seeds. I'll just use this one, make less of a mess. Sesame seeds. Those should be good. Last but not least, we've got chicken going to take these guys and a little dip. It's actually kind of tricky to get the whole thing, so I think I'm just going to pour it over top instead. We are really improvising here. That was truly the perfect camping meal. The charred, smoky flavors, something about those flavors while you're out camping just hit way harder. That was delicious. I took the paddleboard out onto the lake this morning, tried to catch a fish, no bites, and also within the 20 minutes that I was out there, I was absolutely swarmed by mosquitoes. It's quite crazy the amount of mosquitoes that are out there on the lake right now.