Camping: Rain, Bears, Outhouses, Oh My

It was a camping trip that affirms all your worst fears about camping, while at the same time demonstrating once again why you keep coming back.

Best time: singing songs around the campfire and making s’mores with seven boys who thought they’d died and gone to heaven. Worst times: an outhouse so malodorous and disgusting that we dubbed it “hell.”

We had one beautiful night sitting by the campfire under the stars and one night of rain that left us rushing to erect a tarp so we could stay dry by the campfire. We had one night of blissful rest in our cozy tent and one night of tossing and turning while the rain dripped over our sleeping bags from our not-so-waterproof tent roof.


One reason to love camping? Camping is one of the few places, maybe the only place, where there are no computer games or laptops and no phone calls. Just the quiets sound of seven boys from ages 2 to 12 playing with each other. OK, so maybe it wasn’t so quiet, but all that noise doesn’t seem so bad when you’re outside.

The main thing camping did for us was to bring us together. My three brothers and I never get to spend so much time together by ourselves and it’s rare that we have all of the next generation: the seven cousins together. Our own parents weren’t around and now we were the people in charge. It was a strange feeling but we all made it work.

It was worth everything to see the kids playing together. There was 2-year-old Cole and 4-year-Robbie play inside a box like they had landed inside a magic spaceship. There were the “big” kids putting an arm around the younger ones to herd them back to campsite or away from the fire.

Sure, we had to worry about black bears getting into our food. We had to keep constant watch over the younger kids around the fire and the road. We had to put up with walking to “hell” when nature called. Naturally, we found out that we had left behind the syrup and the salt and an entire bag of bread. But our kids were so hungry, nobody noticed.

Yes, we did come home with quite a bit of laundry, including three bags of wet clothes and dozens of items smelling like wood smoke. But it’s a small price to play to be able to sit around the campfire and sing.

It was all worth it when my 12-year-old nephew who’s never shown much interest in family activities, talked about how much fun he was having and asked if we could go next year.

I figure that if you include the preparation and the laundry and the clean up, our two-night camping trip takes about a week of work for preparation and clean-up. But that’s not so much when you consider that it’s the one weekend the kids will be talking about it all year round.