I have two boys. Two very active, messy, full-of-energy boys.
Looking for ways to keep them busy during the summer months can be an exhausting and often fruitless endeavour.
Unfailingly every year I’ll be bombarded with a chorus of little voices asking “When are we going camping?” to which my instinctive response is half past never!
I am not a camper, sleeping on the ground, dealing with bugs, sharing a washroom with other people none of this screams ‘relaxing vacation’ to me. I’m just not that kind of a girl.
My children however love the chance to be outdoors playing all day, meeting new friends and making themselves sick on s’mores late into the evening.
So each year we pack up what seems to be our entire house, put it in the car and drive to a provincial park, providing it has flushing toilets and showers of course.
Once we have unpacked our ridiculous sized pile of provisions the boys run off and start to have fun, I on the other hand now start what is probably the worst part of camping for me, the cooking.
I’m a planner, I spend hours researching and scheduling my vacations so that every last second of fun is accounted for. In preparation for this three days of torture (did I mention three days of camping is my maximum?
Once we only made it three hours before my husband threw everything in the truck including two sobbing kids and a hysterical wife and we drove home.)
I spend days beforehand planning what we’re going to eat.
The first time we went some years ago I had no idea what I was going to do, I’d never really cooked outdoors before other than the barbecue and certainly never on an open fire.
Luckily there are many books out there to help novices such as myself so I plunged into the hitherto unknown world of camping cookbooks.
I learned all the tips and tricks I would need to know to survive the great outdoors from books such as Hungry Campers, by Zac Williams and Camping: Sleep Well, Stay Dry, Eat Great Food, by Ed Douglas.
It didn’t look totally easy but with enough preparation before we left I managed to keep us all relatively well fed.
After the ordeal of cooking is over I then have all the clean up to do, seriously who thought that camping would be a vacation.
Finally, finally after all that is done I can relax.
There are no distractions, no phones, no TV, no jobs that need to be taken care of just me and my book.
This is why I can face my yearly camping trip, this opportunity to just sit in peace, surrounded by beauty.
I can catch up on my ever increasing pile of things to read and just spend time recharging, I would camp just to make my boys happy but this is definitely a part I enjoy.
I envy those who make camping look easy, they seem at ease in nature and think nothing of going away for weeks at a time with not even running water.
This will probably never be me but each year it gets a little easier, a little less daunting and if all else fails I may have to go buy myself a fifth wheel and go “glamping.”
Adele Meadow is an Assistant Community Librarian at the Summerland Branch of the ORL. She’s been enjoying and recommending young-adult books for years.
