A camping we'll not go

This year will be the first year we aren’t planning a camping trip. We decided not to get into the bigger-better cycle that many RVers fall victim to. When we were finished with our tent trailer, we sold it and haven’t replaced it. My husband has a tent stashed away for short trips with the boys.

But let’s be honest; camping is a lot of work. You take the housework with you. And so many people are into it now, you need to make reservations months in advance. Most campsites feel like the line-up of vehicles at rush-hour traffic.

The worst trip has to be when we took a trailer to the Brazeau Reservoir near Drayton Valley, Alberta. When we arrived, it was sunny. By the time we settled in and I took a lawn chair and my novel down to the beach, it began raining. It didn’t let up for three solid days. A trailer is never big enough. And we had a toddler at the time who managed to go through three sets of clothes a day in the muck. Finally, on the fourth day, my husband took us to a hotel in Red Deer. I was so happy you’d think I’d won an SUV on Tim’s Roll-Up-The-Rim-To-Win contest.

The place which gets the vote for strangest has to be a little place we visited last summer in Mission, B.C. It was a mix of permanent residents who looked like American draft dodgers and hippies left over from the seventies. It is situated at a fish hatchery, and a little creek snakes around the campsites. It was damp, overgrown rainforest, and a little frightening, especially when we spotted a slug the size of a house cat. It didn’t help that my husband kept humming the Beverly Hillbillies theme song. On our way out we made a mental note to never return.

Still, I can’t help taking a nostalgic look back on camping trips in the early years of marriage in a three-man dome tent. Not sure where the third person would have slept—our heads touched one end, and our feet poked against the other. It was a simpler time. No reservations needed.

One of the coolest places we camped in that era was on the shore of Lake Athabasca near Fort Chip. It was before my husband and I had our children. We pitched our dome tent on Dog Head Point. The shore was rocky and a wind blew up at night, swirling the flames of our fire, and driving the waves against the rocks. The outhouse was the scariest one ever. It was perched above a rock cliff. Yet, the sun, the waves, the endless azure sky meeting Lake Claire on our fishing adventures were magical.

One place my husband loves is Kananaskis country. The lakes are pristine and frigid. It’s difficult to get a spot there. Calgarians zoom out on Wednesdays to hold spots for the weekends even though it goes against the posted rules. The nights were as frigid as the water, but fortunately the last two days of our stay warmed up so I could take off my long johns. During the day. In July.

For good weather camping, it’s difficult to beat the Okanogan. We pitched our new mammoth two-room tent at the terraced provincial campsite for a week beneath giant trees, enjoying the breeze off the lake, devouring cherries in season. By then we had two children and we loved our large abode. I wonder why we didn’t keep it and continue using it? Vacation would be so much easier in a trailer, we mused. When you believe that one, the next one is: Vacation would be so much better in a larger RV. Nope—not buying it.

So, we’re trying a few years of vacationing without the camping part. I have a feeling the longer we go without camping, the better the memories will be. My husband does have that tent stashed…