Camping

I have camped for as long as I can remember.  It’s something that is part of me.  I know that camping isn’t for everyone, but to me, there are amazing things that happen outdoors. I imagine when I say camping, most people have images that pop up in their mind about their own camping experiences.

I should explain my definition of camping. A sleeping bag under the stars, in a tent, or in a camper is camping. Camping is not sleeping under a non-mobile roof structure. Sleeping inside your house or at a hotel is not camping.  When our kids were younger we pitched a tent in the yard or on our deck, I’d call that camping. Today, my definition of camping includes be away from home. “Roughing it” has a personal definition for everyone. To me, roughing it is no running water or electricity; no bathroom, no hot water, no light bulbs.  My Sister-in-law’s “roughs it” in three star hotels.

The first camping experience I remember was camping with my Dad and older brother, Rusty.  I think my dad only took us once, he worked 7 days a week, so maybe that’s why this was so special to me.  He and his best friend Ed Holden, who had two sons our ages, went along.   We must have been about five or six, maybe younger.  We piled our stuff into a van that my dad borrowed from work.   It was painted the pale yellow and forest green of all the trucks at my dad’s business.  “Kampas Bros” was painted on the side. It was a van manufactured in the early sixties. In those days, vans were purely functional work vehicles.  This one had two bucket seats in the front, no windows in the back and a hard metal floor.

 I know the floor was hard because I recall great relief when we were finally released at the end of the journey.  Interstates 79 and 80 had not yet been built, so it was two lane roads to Cook Forest.  I actually remember very little about what we did there, but I know we cooked over a fire, we four kids crammed into a pup tent too small for us and we bathed in the stream next to our campsite.  The stream felt like it was made of liquid nitrogen. I remember the smell of fresh pine and seeing trout lazing at the bottom of the crystal river.  The fish snubbed the worms we dangled in front of them.

One of the regular things Rusty and I did was to sleep outside during the summer. While not technically camping, because we were not away from home, we had the fresh air of the outdoors and used sleeping bags.  One to five of the neighbor kids were always there too.  We didn’t have air conditioning, so on hot summer nights we’d sneak into the swimming pools of various neighbors to cool off.  We debated everything important to kids, from whether an M-80 will explode under water to what we’d do with a mountain of gumballs. It was a simpler time, before video games and M-TV.

I started camping on my own when I was sixteen.  My best friend, Eric Hoffman, and I were always doing something adventurous.  We had been exposed to rappelling through our youth group at church and became hooked.  We pooled our resources and bought a clothesline from Woolworths. We fashioned our harnesses of hemp rope wrapped into a swami belt.   Through some combination of luck and divine intervention we survived our early forays.  Later, while practicing commando rappels(upside down) with our upgraded hardware store nylon rope, we met some guys at McConnell’s Mill State Park who were starting a rock climbing school. We signed on immediately and within weeks were ‘real’ climbers on our first overnight adventure.  It didn’t take long to realize that there had to be more comfortable ways to sleep on the ground.  Our giant cotton sleeping bags would get replaced by slick, lightweight down filled mummy clouds.  The pebbles that morphed into boulders overnight were smoothed over by a thin piece of foam padding that aged into something that resembled a giant curling potato chip.  It was through rock climbing that I learned to love the smell of nylon and the joy of being lulled to sleep by the symphony of raindrops on the fly.

I climbed and camped all over the country for the following 20 years, but I’ll save those stories for another post.

I am blessed to have a great wife who loves to travel. When we met, Stephanie would have probably have preferred to stay in a nice hotel, but now she's hooked.  An opportunity to travel, even if it’s camping, is preferred to staying home.  We started out camping in a tent, just as I always had.  After our daughters moved out of baby mode, we started camping as a family. Within a few years, Steph took pity on me for all the effort it took to set up camp. It was she who suggested that we get a pop-up.  We loved that camper because it was easy to haul and the feeling of being in a tent was there.  Unfortunately, the pop-up still required a significant amount of set up time and energy.

Last Spring we broke camper protocol.  The accepted sequence of camper ownership flows like a well choreographed ballet.  We should have moved to a hybrid camper. A hybrid is a cross between pop-up and hardside camper . The hybrid has tent ends which fold out, plus they have the kitchen and bathroom of a travel trailer.   Our mistake was taking the whole family to look at campers . Instead of a hybrid, we moved from a pop-up to a 33 foot long rolling hotel suite.  Think of how the Stay Puff marshmallow man lumbered in “Ghost Busters” and you’ll know the feeling of seeing our camper chasing you in the rearview mirror.   Who wouldn’t prefer a rolling Taj Macamper.  

The kids have their own bunks and with enough beds for 9 people, each can bring a friend without feeling cramped.  The key ingredient  for a family with three daughters and wife with thimble size bladders is the bathroom.

We have had a great time this summer. The experiences that we’ve shared as a camping family will stay with us forever.  They are priceless memories.