A camping we will go

For several weeks now, we’ve enjoyed day after day of glorious sunshine. Or at least, the people who don’t spend their waking hours in windowless offices have. So, I was hoping that our Memorial Day camping trip would be an opportunity to soak up the rays, get some Vitamin D and perhaps a little color to my skin. (Technically “toad underbelly” is a color, but I was thinking of something a little more...appealing).

Living in Phoenix, camping was our way of escaping the summer heat and winter smog. In a couple of hours, we could be up in the high country, amid pine trees, lakes and cool, clean air so we took off at every opportunity. Of course, since relocating to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, we have our very own campground right outside the front door. Our backyard is as pretty as any wilderness site, without the hassle of keeping the beer cool or loading the truck with crap. Subsequently, we haven’t felt the same burning desire to sleep under canvas and it was with surprise we realized that other than a brief trip I took earlier this spring, it’s now 3 1/2 years since we last used our camping gear.

As a general rule, we avoid camping on holiday weekends. Actually, as a general rule we avoid leaving the house on holiday weekends, but we figured it had been so long since we’d last been, and the weather was so nice, that we could put up with a few crowds in order to get a couple of nights away. That said, I had no desire to spend my weekend sitting in a line of traffic, so we chose to visit Wellington Lake, a breathtakingly pretty site only about 15 miles from our house.

To beat the crowds, we pitched our tent early Friday morning before I went to work. By the time we returned on Saturday morning, the campsite had filled considerably. Even so, our tent site was still one of the better ones. Away from the lake to avoid the mosskeeters (hate them, hate them, hate them) but close enough to know it was there. Near the toilets, but not too near. And with enough trees to shade us from the sun. The other campers were closer than I would have preferred but hey, it’s a holiday weekend after all. We had a brief moment of excitement when Houdini-dog broke the tie-out and introduced herself to most of the neighbors before we caught her, but other than that, it only took a few minutes to set up home. Dear Wife was soon busy arranging the sleeping bags so I took both dogs for a stroll around the lake shore.

And what a crowded shore it was too. Big tents, little tents, camper trailers, trailers on steroids, RV’s in all shapes and sizes, each one packed to the gills with happy campers roasting bratwurst, chugging cheap beer, fishing from the shoreline and generally cramming as much fun as is possible into one three day weekend. Even the lake was full of kayaks, canoes, catamarans and sailboats. The sun glinted like silver on the ripples and I breathed a contented sigh. It was going to be a good weekend.

The rain started a little after lunchtime. Not too bad, just showers but they continued on and off throughout the afternoon. No big deal, we had books to read and CD walkmans to listen to and our tent is quite capacious enough for two humans and two dogs, even when wet. Every now and then I stuck my head through the tent flaps and whenever blue sky, appeared above, hopped out for some exercise. And so the day passed. No lazing about in the sunshine as I’d hoped but disappointing though that may have been, it was a whole lot better than the night.

I figured there would be some noise. You don’t get that many people in one place without some evidence of human activity. Particularly not when most of them are tanked up on domestic beer. But it’s usual for campers to pay at least a passing respect to the curfew hours and tone things down a little after 10pm. Not this bunch. If anything, they got louder. Whoopin’, hollerin’, singin’ and cussin’, on and on and on. The men were almost as bad. Still, things didn’t get really noisy ‘till some helpful soul yelled at them to keep it down. That’s when the car doors were opened and the stereo was cranked up.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of being close to nature. Lying on your back, feeling the cool air playing through the gauze window. Noticing the scent of the pine trees on the breeze. Feeling the gentle rhythmic breath of your familiar critters as they sleep at your feet. All the while being serenaded by rap music played at ear splitting decibels. It used to be you could tell white-trash by their mobile homes, junker cars and lack of teeth. Now they haul their $150,000 trailers around behind $50,000 SUVs and have expensive caps. But they’s still traish.

Eventually morning arrived, as mornings usually do. And with it came the rain. Oh boy, did it rain. Sheets of it, sweeping in from the west. Unrelenting and torrential. Very occasionally it would slow enough that I could take the dogs out for a whiz but mostly, we spent the day huddled in the tent which surprisingly, no longer seemed quite so large. By mid afternoon the thunder started and the lake disappeared behind a wall of rain. Any hopes of an evening fire were quashed as the carefully collected kindling was soon soaked through.

Regular readers of The Gunsmoke Files will recall how sheer willpower prevented me from wimping out of my last camping trip, despite barely surviving hypothermia when the weather turned so cold Scott of the Antarctic would have run for home. Since then, I’ve come to the conclusion such stoicism is overrated and had no particular desire to repeat the experience.

So, it didn’t take a whole lot of debate before we threw the gear in the back of the truck and headed for our cozy little house, not too far away. Of course, I feel a certain amount of guilt that a lack of self-discipline caused us to give up. Rather than the wilderness experience I’d envisaged, I spent Sunday evening surfing the web, while drinking ice cold vodka with jalapeno stuffed olives, then sleeping late in a nice warm bed.

That wasn’t quite on a par with shivering in a tent listening to someone else’s rap music, but on the whole, I’ll take it.