Camping can be fun!

Despite beach sand in your socks and torrential downpours of unwelcomed August rain that leave you stranded inside the arcade drinking an overpriced Slushie and handing quarters to your children every time the pinball machine cheats them out of their third ball.

Really. Camping can be fun.

It can be a wholesome family experience even if all the sleeping bags smell damply smoky and the daddy long legs have started a colony on the screened roof of your tent. It’s fun to lie there on your slowly-deflating air mattress, staring up at the ceiling while their long, spindly legs scurry this way and that, all the while knowing the only thing separating you from certain panic and blood-curdling screams is mesh. Did you know daddy-long legs aren’t actually spiders? They have only six legs. Trust me, I’m an expert on the amount of legs they have as I counted them over and over again while lying there in the dark, obsessing about whether or not they had eaten their way through my tent and were sucking the life from the sleeping toddler next to me.

Sand is for beaches. A leafy forest ground is for camping. Sand mixed with camping only makes for a gritty, impossible-to-keep-clean tent and sandy bits that sneak their way into your sleeping back and lodge themselves either a) up your butt crack, b) in your nose and armpits or c) up your butt crack. Either way you wake up scratching.

And partly due to my inefficient packing skills, we may have been without a few of the necessities that make camping tolerable fun. Like pepper, enough paper towels, and soap. Yes, I said SOAP. I didn’t pack it. Let’s just say I learned one of life’s lessons the hard way. Don’t wash your body parts with Head ‘n Shoulders shampoo. It burns.

Moving on.

Overall it was a regular camping trip filled with cheeseburgers, s’mores, canoeing, and general happiness.

Don’t I look happy?




That's because I'm drunk.