we went camping over the weekend, an activity I will always recommend. This weekend was our roughly-annual campout with my parents and all the siblings local enough to reasonably make it. This adds an additional delightful game of "what can I get away with not bringing since someone else should be" plus "what should I make sure to bring cuz everyone always forgets it". You gotta thread the needle of minimalism to make loading/unloading easier while also having just enough extra stuff to go "aw yeah check out this luxary"; I love it.
We had the advantage of getting to the campsite second with enough of a window to grab things the first parties forgot; this allowed me to fill the niches of additional seating, emergency level[1], and tongs. Because I love bushcraft, though, I opted to make a pair of them from a green branch and make everyone use that for a few hours before revealing I had indeed brought the promised tongs. Am I vain, and do I have to flex a little? Maybe.
Lest I let my head grow too big, I forgot that my family at large greatly prefers disposable dishware camping while me and Em would much rather do the dishes and enjoy the heft of a mug, the clatter of a platter, and the flare of silverware. We made it work, but that's a luxary I'll have to note for next time. Furthermore, the first night was absolutely awful: Snapdragon was not a fan of the sleep arrangement, and Gooseberry not a fan of Snap's displeasure. It took hours to settle down and then right as we did we were rudely informed that some sort of sporting event had occured and would be concluding via the repetative ignition of colorful explosives. These distant booms were, I'm sure, pleasurable up close but out in the wilderness it half woke up a baby and started a long process over again.
The good, though:
- I lit more fires via a ball of fire held in my fingertips
- I showed and/or reminded my siblings/nephew how to enter/climb a hammock stack, which is always funny. I did not demonstrate how to put up a fourth hammock, which is outside the reach of several six-and-roughly-a-half foot tall guys and actually requires some climbing. I didn't feel like risking the fall, especially given the amount of poison ivy around.
- we rented a peddleboat; Goose and her cousins getting puttered around by their uncles/grandparents while I lay on a blanket in the shade/assisted in on/offboarding boaters was delightfuly idyllic. Also there was icecream.
- I got to sit in a tent in the rain, one of the most perfect things in the world. It was on our last day so we could deflate our mattress and bring in some chairs and sit. I woulda stayed through the looming storm instead of breaking camp during the lull but our kids are less than fine with the thunder and it looks like it was more violent than would have been nice for our current situation.
this campground turned out to be comically sloped across the board; our tents were all thankfully pretty level but tables were not; I am told the first egg slid straight off the propane griddle and onto the ground and we ended up adding inches of height to one side. I also saw some campers doing some extreme balancing on 4x4s to get level... there was not a completely flat site in sight. ↩︎