My family and I just got back from a week in the woods. In order to escape the one-hundred-degree heat in the northern California valley, we packed up the trailer and headed for the much cooler climate of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
I know perhaps many of you are thinking to yourselves, “What? Another blog about a camping trip? Don’t you ever do anything else?”
The short answer to that is, no. No, I don’t ever do anything else. I’m stuck at home most of the time and I don’t have the money to fly around the world, so whenever I have an opportunity to get away it has to be cheap. Cheap, for me, equals camping.
Now, where was I? Oh, yeah: I was camping.
My wife and I enjoy taking the trailer out and travelling into the wilderness for a few days. It’s quiet and peaceful and it’s an opportunity for the two of us to just hang out with each other with no outside interruptions. The kids claim to enjoy it as well, but I think they just like to be away from home so I can’t complain about the fact they haven’t cleaned their rooms or done any of their chores.
For the entire five days that we were gone, neither one of the girls left the trailer except for an occasional jaunt up the hill to the only spot in the campgrounds that had an active WiFi signal. Otherwise, they barricaded themselves inside our camper like they were afraid the zombie apocalypse had just jumped off and if they went outside they would be the first ones eaten.
Actually, that’s not completely true. They did come outside on the third night we were there. That was the night I built a campfire hoping to lure them outdoors. I set up the fire, burned several large logs for a few hours, then stirred them around to create hot coals. My wife pulled out a bag of marshmallows, chocolate and a box of graham crackers. She told the girls they should come out to the fire and make some s’mores. At first, they both said, no, but then my wife reminded them that it had been their idea to buy all the stuff in the first place. She suggested if they didn’t go outside and make s’mores immediately, it would not just be marshmallows that got stabbed with sharp sticks and dropped into the fire.
EM1 poked her head out of the trailer door first, sniffing around like a groundhog trying to decide if there was going to be six more weeks of winter. When she was convinced it wasn’t a trap, she beckoned to her sister and the two of them shuffled out to the fire. Each one of them picked up a stick, stabbed a marshmallow and held it out over the hot coals in the fire pit.
After they had both roasted one marshmallow, they said, “thank you,” waved at us and went back inside the trailer. That was it.
One marshmallow.
Each.
Other than the fact we couldn’t pry the kids out of the trailer with a crowbar, it was actually a very nice family trip. Because we had no WiFi reception where we were parked, we couldn’t use our phones or watch TV. We were forced to interact with one another whether we wanted to or not.
The four of us ended up playing card games and board games, and – on rare occasions – even talking to each other.
It was a lot of fun.
Electronic devices weren’t the only distraction we managed to avoid, either. During the first part of the week, we had most of the campgrounds to ourselves. Most people tend to go camping on the weekends, which is why we specifically decided to go during the week. For the first three days that we were there, the only noises we heard were the birds, animals and bugs in the forest. Well, that and the sound of our kids fighting over whose fault it was that a soda got dumped on the floor. (Personally, I blame the older one. It’s easier to randomly pick one than it is to investigate and figure out who actually did it.)
We stayed up late, slept in the following morning and nobody bothered us. No barking dogs, no loud parties, and no screaming kids (except for our own, of course). It was bliss.
On the fourth day, things began to change. A motorhome pulled into the slot next to ours. The owners brought three tiny dogs outside, tied them to a tree and then proceeded to ignore them while they barked nonstop from sunup to sundown.
A young family showed up later the same day and set up a tent near us. They had three kids, all under the age of seven, that they immediately turned loose with a collection of bikes and scooters so they could travel the campgrounds with maximum mobility. I believe the only time the kids weren’t yelling or screaming was when they were forced to pause to take a breath. The noise parade lasted all day, packed up briefly during the night, then started up again about five o’clock the following morning.
By day five, it was time to go. I was starting to fantasize about putting the yapping dogs into a pit with the screaming kids and making them fight in a no-holds-barred deathmatch. When I caught myself holding a shovel and searching for a place to put the hole, I decided the time had come to go home.
Now, we’re all back in the hundred-degree heat and getting back into to our regular routines. My wife is back at work, EM2 is getting ready to go back to school, and EM1 is doing whatever the hell it is that she usually does.
And me? I’m doing what I always do. Sitting around and trying to figure out a good time to go camping.
.
.
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