I grew up in a camping family. More accurately we were a sleep-in-your-car family, but let’s not split any outdoor-loving hairs.
Paul grew up going to their comfy 3-bed, 2-bath, 2-loft family cottage in Canada for the summers. Roughing it was looking for morels between tennis and golf games. He continues to like his down time doing more of the things he likes and less of the things he doesn’t. Can’t argue with that.
A repetitive longing was expressed to us through the girls’ childhood, “If only they’d been born into a camping family.” Longing turned to whining, turned to begging. We eventually came away from the camping negotiation table not sure if we had won or lost. No tents, but three weeks in an RV and two weeks in a pop-up trailer alongside the envied camping family extraordinaire (you know who you are). This was a one-time offer never to be repeated, take it or leave the deal to die on the table. They took it.
It’s a solid hunch that referring to the RV lifestyle as a form of camping may get one blacklisted from the traveling trailer community at large. But, emptying tanks of poop and dirty shower water should at least validate it as a distant camping cousin, no matter how fancy the rig.
We don’t go back on our promises, so RVamping we did go. We rented an RV from friends, and drove through five
provinces, focusing on the Eastern coast of Canada, then down the New England shoreline. The second part of this
experience was to trade in our RV for a pop-up, fold-out origami camper for couple of weeks with our hardcore camping friends to some beautiful spots on Lake Ontario.
There were beautiful moments; at Prince Edward Island’s red sand beaches, taking pictures for Asians at Anne of Green Gables cottage, eating fresh lobsters cooked over a campfire in Maine.
There were beautiful backdrops to some not so beautiful moments; the girls watching their daddy swear at and fight
raccoons over the garbage, emptying the waste tank (ok, that’s disgusting, and should have come with better instructions), realizing the rv can’t stop as fast as a car when you’re tailgating, huddling in a tin box during a massive lightening storm yelling at the girls not to touch any metal, just in case….good, good times.
After we’d etched those memories in mental stone, we told the girls the next time they would go camping or any of its
distant cousins, would be when they were adults. That was his sugar-coated version. We, their parents, were simply not mentally tough enough for it.