A Taste of Camping Life

I never know what people think we mean when we say we’re going camping for a week.  What do you think of? I guess I grew up going camping every summer- we would pack up the van and go pitch a tent in the middle of the woods for weeks at a time, and now my family does very much the same thing.  So to me, that’s what camping is- it’s relaxing and it’s fun, and it’s just so wonderful to put the busy-ness of every day life behind us for a little while.   But it occurred to me that our idea of camping and your idea of camping are quite likely not the same thing.  So let’s take a tour shall we?

First, this is a photo of home.  For the most part.  Our site this week was huge, so I couldn’t squeeze it all in the photo.  You can see our big orange monstrosity to the right, that’s our tent where we sleep, but it’s also large enough to play games or cards or curl up with a book in case of rain.  To the back is the screen tent- and over to the left where you see the camp chairs and the back of Andy’s head? That’s the fire pit.

Here is a close up of the “dining room”.  It’s a screen tent that we set up over a picnic table so that we may dine bug-free if we so choose.  We don’t use this all the time, but it does come in handy.

Next, here is the kitchen.  It’s a propane gas stove that in actuality, doesn’t get used much.  We use it first thing in the morning to heat up water for our coffee- which we do in a French press.  It’s much quicker than lighting a fire first thing.  But every once in a while we’ll use the stove for a pot of rice or something.  Or for frying up pancakes or bacon or something that would be annoying to do over the fire.

Here’s the second part of the kitchen- a close up of the fire pit.  We do almost all cooking here, as Andy is totally in his element cooking with fire.  The big grate you see is ours- we take it with us, and have yet to find something we can’t cook on it.  And while you might expect that when camping we would eat things like burgers and hot dogs, this year our dinner menu consisted of pork tenderloin steaks, chicken kebabs, lemon-garlic leg of lamb, sirloin steak, BBQ chicken, and Cajun shrimp.  We eat well.  🙂

Here is our wash station.  We use this for everything.  This is our dish-washing center, laundry center, and the closest thing we have to a shower or bath.  For real.  🙂  No running water here!  We use several jugs to haul water to camp, and when we want warm water we need to heat it up.  We also have several laundry lines strung up for hanging towels and wet things should we have them.  Come mid-week we usually find ourselves in need of some bathing, so then we take turns warming up water and going into the tent to scrub up as best as possible.  The kids seemed to manage okay this week by simply spending time in the water.

And I know you’re dying to see this next photo.  This would be the bathroom.  And yes, you will certainly not find a flushing toilet in here.  Simply a hole in the ground and some toilet paper.  It does make the middle-of-the-night bathroom run a bit challenging, as I find myself furiously sweeping a flashlight from side to side, watching for any creatures of the night.  But for the most part, they do a really good job keeping the potties clean.

Oh! And what family home would be complete without a pet?  This is simply one of many, many chipmunks we spent time with.  For the most part they were afraid of us, but when we dropped a bit of something on the ground they conquered their fear and came closer.  The kids spent the week deciding which ones were Alvin, Simon or Theodore, and liked sharing their morning cereal with them.

One of the things we like to do while camping is fishing.  I actually spent quite a bit of time fishing this week, as did Abigail.  Sadly for us, there weren’t any real keepers.  We kept a couple small ones in a bucket that Abigail had caught simply to show them off, but there weren’t any worth keeping and filleting for dinner.  We caught mostly panfish, a few perch, I caught a largemouth bass, and a whole mess of nasty catfish.  Those were probably big enough to keep…but they’re really yucky looking and they also have venom in their fins, so you need to be careful when handling them or you get a bit of a sting.

For other bits of entertainment we also did a bit of swimming at the beach.  Zander conquered his fear of the water beautifully and by the end of the week he was begging to do more swimming.  It was great.

We round out our days by eating plenty of food at meal times, as leftovers are not welcome, and there’s always something new to explore when walking through the woods.  By the end of the week Abigail was confident enough to take herself and her little brother on their own little nature walk- and was quite proud of herself for doing so.  It rained just a few times- mostly in the early morning so it didn’t really affect our days much.   There’s no electricity-  and no cellphone reception either.  It’s quiet, and you see more stars at night than you ever thought possible.  One night we heard wolves howling in the distance, another night the coyotes took their turn, and yet another night a few owls hunted down some prey mere feet from our tent. Definitely a bit different from the neighborhood sounds we have here.

Every day we would find ourselves busy doing this and that, but in a relaxing way.  There was no hustle and bustle- nothing that we absolutely had to do.  When we felt like swimming, we’d go swimming.  When we felt like fishing, we’d hang some worms on a hook and cast some lines.  We slept in until we felt like waking, ate when we were hungry, and seldom even thought to look at a clock.  When we packed up to leave on Saturday I thought about I really did feel like a rested for a week.  It felt wonderful, and as such, I’ve been a little slow in returning to normal life.  Of course, the mountain of laundry is slowly shrinking, the gear is being packed away until next year, and there is a garden to tend to.  Today we have some grocery shopping to do, but it may take a few days for normalcy to rear its ugly head.  And apparently while we were gone the calendar decided it was August… how did that happen?