Degrees of camping

One time Steve asked me if we could go camping sometime and I said SURE with great enthusiasm; and this surprised him because I am not a very outdoorsy kind of person, so he asked whether I liked camping and I said I LOVE CAMPING, and he said, But where would you go to the bathroom?

I said, In the bathroom, up the hill from the campground. And we stared at each other blankly for a while, and then, to make it clear what kind of camping I was accustomed to (and what kind of camping I had every right to expect if we ever went camping), I added, Right before making pancakes for breakfast, in the pan that we hook up to the electrical outlet, next to the tents. YA CRAZY.

Actually, in recent years my camping activities have been kind of not so much roughing it. We do build fires and roast marshmallows and eat delicious s’mores, but we also camp inside of modular cabins (they’re modular. there are first-class cabins at this place, and there are modular ones. I don’t know what that means either.) rather than tents, and we have masses of delicious food to eat. The last time we went camping, my family was living in one cabin, and my lovely uncle and aunt were living in the next cabin, and those of us who didn’t feel like hiking or canoeing confined our activities to moving from one cabin to another in search of our next meal.

(In our defense, the meals were extremely tasty. My father made flying biscuits for breakfast, and we had eggs and bacon as well, and I don’t remember what the dinners consisted of but I know they were the most fantastic dinners of all time.)

The time before that I had just discovered Elizabeth Peters, so I basically sat on the couch in the modular cabin and read the first four Amelia Peabody books (ah, what a happy time that was!), and I think I went walking with my mother once. I am at heart a lazy, lazy person, and when you discover a brand new excellent author it is hard to feel enthusiastic about going on paddleboats (killing machines that they are) or exploring the forest. Although usually I enjoy exploring forests, as long as I can be sure there are no Lyme-disease-spreading ticks.

Now, when I was a child, we were really really hardcore. One time we went camping and it was so, so, so windy that we could barely set up our tent, and once it had been set up we had to stay in it all the time or it would blow away. My father used to take my sisters and me camping all the time, and we would set up our own tents and put sleeping bags and make hot dogs over a fire (sometimes - we weren’t the best fire-makers of all time), and Dad would take us into the nearest town and we would buy crap with our allowances, and in the morning, as I have said, we would make pancakes. That’s what you DO when you go camping.

I mention this because apparently there are people in the world who just go find a spot of ground and put a tent on it and don’t worry about whether there is a bathroom or a shower place! They just don’t take showers until they come home again! And I want these people to realize that things can be different for them. Camping can be much more joyous than you think, people. There can be pancakes.