August Camping Adventures, Part 1: My Dirty Little Secret

Yesterday was the first time we’ve Skyped with Aude since she returned to France.  She was yawning at 9:30 at night, and I have no doubt that she’s jumped right into school and social life with gusto since leaving last Sunday night from Chicago.  How could a month go by so quickly, and yet the beginning of the month seems like a lifetime ago?

My travel adventures changed drastically after I returned home from Europe at the end of July.  The first week was a blur of jet lag, laundry, and preparing for my friend Raigan’s visit.  She came with her boys down from her parents’ house in the Chicago suburbs; I felt so lucky to see her twice this summer:  once in her home and Frankfurt, and once when she made her annual trip home to the U.S.  We visited a mutual friend, we had long chats, we invited friends over and the kids ran around together like they had been friends forever.

Two days after she left we would pack up the car and travel north to camp for 10 days in Michigan and Wisconsin.  The last thing I felt like doing was packing.  I actually felt a bit sick when I pulled my toiletry case down from the shelf.  Again.

And…can I tell you my dirty little secret?  I hate camping.

I’ve tried to like it for a long time.  My parents and I never went camping together; my mother refused.  She grew up in a rural area and in a farmhouse that didn’t get electricity until she was 18 years old.  She insists that she was camping for 18 years, and didn’t consider camping as a vacation.  I didn’t feel like I was missing anything until my good friend in early high school years convinced me that I needed that experience:  sleeping outdoors, the smell of camp coffee in the morning, s’mores, campfires and all your clothes smelling like wood smoke.  That all sounded fine and dandy, so I bought a sleeping bag and a duffel bag for my clothes (which would double as my pillow—how outdoorsy I was!), and got myself invited on the family vacation to Door County, Wisconsin.  Becky’s parents had a customized van which they slept in, and Becky, another friend Carole, and I would sleep in the tent.  With flashlights!  And giggling!  Just like a slumber party, but outside in the woods!  My tent-mates made fun of my inexperienced packing (hair doo-dads to match my totally impractical outfits, especially; hey, it was the early ‘80s), but I was not deterred.  This would be absolute fun.

The first night we did all the things.  The s’mores over the campfire, the ghost stories, the pitter-patter of little animals’ feet in our campsite.  And then it started to rain.  Not just a little sprinkle, but a real, honest-to-god gully-washer.  When I realized a veritable river was running between the tarp on the ground and the floor of our tent—soaking every hair doo-dad, sleeping bag, duffel bag and inch of clothing on my person—the honeymoon was over.  I announced to whomever was listening that I would be sleeping in the van with B’s parents.  Everyone laughed.  I begged.  Everyone laughed harder, and then suggested I get some sleep in my soggy bedclothes.  We spent the next day at the Laundromat instead of the beach; we amused ourselves by buying Brides magazines and telling each other our families’ geneologies.

OK, so parts of it were fun.  Carole getting sunburnt everywhere except for my handprints on her shoulders where I had put the 15SPF sunscreen.  Making a life-sized sand mermaid on the beach, instead of the more traditional sand castle (the effect was even more outstanding when we found a cigarette butt to stick between her lips).  Standing on the picnic table after dinner, trying not to move or sneeze, waiting for the skunks which had invaded the campsite to leave.  My very first Wisconsin fish boil.  Early morning delectable cinnamon rolls from the neighboring bakery.  But it didn’t take me long to realize I could have had most of these fun experiences while sleeping on a real bed.

But I didn’t stop there.  Car camping expanded to the Rockies with my now husband, who did [or didn’t] propose to me over a beer in a lodge which we couldn’t afford to stay in; he also may [or may not] have proposed to me in the campground later.  Undisputed was the fact that we had spent a couple of very cold nights at 9000 ft. in a rudimentary campground while listening to bears rustle around outside our tent as we tried in vain to breathe and sleep. 

I was still trying to like camping when we did a six-day, 100-kilometer hike up and down the slave trails of Brazil’s Chapada Diamantina on our four-month honeymoon.  It was the kind of camping where you don’t have the air pump to pump up your jumbo air mattress.  It was the kind of camping where you might have to get up in the middle of the night, grab your tent, and run up the mountainside in the dark to avoid being swept away into the waterfall.  It was the kind of camping where you bathe in freezing cold mountain streams, where you can’t use shampoo or soap, where if you say you need to go to the bathroom, you’re handed a small shovel.

That trip didn’t endear me to camping either.  But I didn’t stop.

The closest I was to stopping camping was when we emerged from our tent in beautiful southern Illinois one morning, all proud of ourselves for taking our four-month-old baby on his first camping trip, only to discover a gigantic tick sucking the life-blood out of our infant, right there on his bald little head.

I didn’t want to go camping for a while.

But then a few years ago we met these wonderful people, all families with their kids about the same age as ours in our fabulous day care.  And they camp.  For fun.  Together.  And so, we have been camping together for a few years now. We haven’t stopped, despite our son sitting down in the campfire one year and getting third-degree burns.  We haven’t stopped, despite surviving rain and 100-degree temps.  We just keep camping.  As usual, we made our reservations with them in February or March this year for a few days’ stay at the campground at Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin.  And when Aude decided to come to the U.S., we knew that part of her adventure would be camping with us.  For better or for worse.

More camping adventures to follow.