I have to admit I hated camping but a couple of years ago I joined my camping loving children and grandchildren on a trip and that was it, I was hooked. No one was more surprised than me and I now have all my own kit including a very easy to put up tent that I can do myself and that I can stand up in.
Sometimes we do a desert crossing and other times we park at a very isolated beach. There are no organized campsites here but one thing we always have is proper washing facilities that we rig up ourselves and for that reason one of the vehicles is always the water car. It’s full of water cooler sized containers of water and nothing else. We also have one of the vehicles rigged up with a fridge that’s run on the battery because we need to be careful of food hygiene where we live.
Actually this thread has cheered me up no end and given me a kick in the bum that’s helped jolt me out of the doldrums I’ve been in. I’m really looking forward to the winter now and it’s going to make the last 8 weeks of our summer all the more doable.
Sometimes we go en masses as a family. Other times it’s just a few of us. Then again it could be an idea that got bigger the more it was spoken about and there could be 20 vehicles on a trip with some people you know and friends of theirs you’ve never met before.
My job on the trips is to be the tea lady and I’m happy sitting outside my tent boiling water on the fire and handing out my homemade cakes and biscuits. But I’ve just realized maybe I’m been kept out the way in case I fall in the big campfire or something. I’m accident prone.
One of my best camping memories? Sitting on a deserted beach with my lot eating small fresh crabs as they came out of the pot. Two of my boys had rigged up some kind of contraption and caught them for us. They even cooked them in salt water.
Funny moment. Reaching over the side of my camping chair and toppling over. It then caused a chain reaction of mishaps involving other people, drinks and food that we still laugh about.
I love it when my grandchildren tidy my tent up for me in the morning and sort my bed out for me at night. They even make sure my pee pee bucket is at the back of my tent just in case. I’ve never asked them to do it, they just got on with it themselves. I think it came about on my first trip when I had a small pop up tent that you kind of just throw and it pops up, after one night in it I was so stiff I couldn’t stand up in the morning to get out so one pushed me out from inside the tent whilst another pulled me through the flap from the outside.
Oh and wherever we go we always do a beach or desert clean up. It’s shocking what other people will leave behind when there’s rubbish bins parked in the middle of the wilderness here just because.
These trips are the only time I’ll ever camp.