Health & Fitness
Roughing it!
Every summer my kids want to camp in the backyard, and every year I make my husband do it and I come up with an excuse not to. So how did I handle my first camping trip?!
I hate to admit it, but I’m kind of high maintenance. I came to this conclusion recently when we decided to go camping. We have friends that have an RV and camp regularly and over a glass of wine (or two…), we decided to take a camping trip together.
We were getting our floors done and had to be out of the house for a week, and having a dog limits your choices, so “a camping we would go!” This is the point I realized I am high maintenance, there was no way I wanted to be sleeping in a tent in the sultry August temperatures so I started researching campsites with cabins.
The first cabins I found were really just shacks, a wooden shelter with no amenities. I have had two kids and am in my 40s, I can guarantee I will have to get up to the bathroom at least once during the night, and the idea of taking a flashlight and trekking across a field to a bathroom was not appealing. So a bathroom was a must, too, and I figured what the heck, if I really want to be comfortable, why not get the cabin with AC?
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We kicked our camping vacation up a notch to “Glamping”, in other words, glamorous camping. We packed every inch of my SUV and off we went! Our 13-year-old daughter summed it up when she saw the cabin “It’s like Little House On The Prairie…. but with a television.” But for newbie campers like us it was perfect.
We did get to experience some of the traditional camping fun, we made a point of not cooking on the stove in our cabin (or use the microwave) and we sat around our campfire every night and made s’mores.
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Our days were spent swimming in the site pool and walking our dog around the campground. Campers are some of the friendliest people I have ever met, they would stop by our site and ask about our dog and nod hello as you walked past theirs.
The majority of people there were not tent campers, they were in RVs or caravans. Many of them had a sticker on their vehicles of a map of the United States, with each state they had visited colored in. I can see the appeal of seeing the country this way. You can bring your creature comforts wherever you go, and still be on vacation. I could handle this kind of “roughing it!”
Maybe my next plan should be convincing my family to take a cross-country road trip in an RV…watch this space!
