Planning to attend a wedding and my husband suggested camping…
Growing up my experience with camping was a tent in our yard or the van pulled up by the door so that we could sleep out in it. Asking my dad about going camping always resulted in the same ‘We live in the country, why would we want to sleep out in it’… There would sometimes be the story about when he was in the military and found a snake in his shoe.
When my brother and I wanted to tent camp, we would set up the tent in the backyard, back by our deer pen, run an extension cord from the house and move all our ‘camping’ equipment in. The same would go for camping in the van. My mother would pull the conversion van up to the front door and we’d run an extension cord out with to run our tv, clock and any other ‘camping’ equipment we needed.
Days while growing up though were spent running around the woods when we weren’t going with my mother to the field. Hiking through the woods was something I tried to do frequently — as long as my mother would let me… she had an fear of strangers finding me in the woods (on our property). Surprisingly she wasn’t afraid of the family members that should have been high on her list…. (That’s another story) Power would sometimes go out in our house for over a week at a time. My father had built in a wood burning furnace to go with the gas furnace that had replaced the old coal burner.
We are still surrounded by woods, and being older I am now confused by the whole wanting to sleep outside with no bathroom and air conditioning. Preferring to hike on someone else’s property over our own is also confusing — except for the instances like going to a different region of the country. Yellowstone, the Mountains, even Canada are places over time I’ve been to hike with my husband. Camping ranks just a little better than parachuting in my mind…. like the why jump out of a perfectly good plane, I’m faced with why sleep outside when there is a perfectly good motel nearby.
So when faced with this question, we did what made sense — booked hotel rooms. One of these days we’ll get an RV and discuss travelling a little, but for now staying in a hotel makes sense.
