We went camping from Wednesday to Friday of this past week with another family from our church who have three girls almost the exact ages of ours. They all get along like a house on fire (that's a positive metaphor, by the way). While the days were warm and extremely windy, the temperature dropped below freezing at night. We bought five warm sleeping bags before we left France last year, but somehow we've lost one. . . so Papa ended up with the lightweight sleeping bag, and I just about froze my you-know-what off. I wore sweat pants, a long sleeve shirt and a sweatshirt at night, and still hardly slept. But then, that's part of camping, isn't it? We haven't been camping as a family for many, many years, and this trip brought back some great memories. Since I wasn't sleeping, I was up before dawn the first morning and I lit a fire to warm up. One part of camping that I'd forgotten about, and definitely don't miss, is dealing with the smoke from the fire - which has the uncanny ability of following you from spot to spot as you keep moving your chair to avoid it. Unfortunately for us, the wind was blowing most of the time for the two days we were there, and it kept shifting direction which meant you just couldn't stay out of the smoke. Every bit of clothing we brought smells like smoke. C'est la vie, as we say in France. The first evening we broke out the Graham crackers, Hershey's chocolate (yeuck) and marshmallows, and proceeded to have a S'mores "orgy" (is there any camping tradition as well known as "S'mores"?) The only thing that would have made the evening perfect would have been some nice, dark, French chocolate.
We started a list of things we either forgot, or don't yet own:
1. The bag of nozzles for the inflatable air mattresses. We ended up having only three useable air mattresses out of five, and one of them would gradually deflate throughout the night. Our second night there I had to blow the mattress up again three or four times during the night, just to stay off the ground. Needless to say, we didn't get a lot of sleep.
2. Gas cooker. Our friends own one of those gas cookers that you have to prime by pumping the rod in and out to build up pressure - remember those? Their cooker is around 40 years old and still works - just like their antique metal cooler and their 50 year-old Envinrude outboard motor for the boat; Some things just never wear out (American ingenuity at its best). On the way home we stopped at Walmart, and I bought a cooker... except this one works with propane rather than gas.
3. Coffee pot. This is an essential part of camping for me. Our friends have an old-fashioned blue enamel percolating coffee pot - one that you can just leave on the fire indefinitely, and just keep adding coffee and water. The end result is real "cowboy coffee" - nice and strong.
Rick (the other Dad) and I took all our fishing gear in the hope of catching "the big one". Rick did catch around 20 trout over the two days using his "magical" Tasmanian Devil lure. I took my fly rod with me, but with wind was so strong that I gave up on fly-fishing after the first morning because I was more likely to hook myself than any fish. I did catch seven fish using a borrowed spin-casting rod & reel, so it wasn't a total loss :)
We're planning to go camping at least one more time this summer, up in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. It's about a 10 hour drive, so we'll probably spend at least three days up there. We've never been to Yellowstone, and I am really looking forward to it. I need some new photos to paint from, and I hear Yellowstone is the place to go.
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