My Life: The Meh Outdoors

A change in schedule and blogspot being down for a bit will make this a shorter entry than usual. Sorry about that, my nonexistent readers! On the plus side, since last we talked I found a roommate, so I have one less thing to panic about. Woohoo!

So to make this a shorter entry, I'll focus on a single periodic event of my childhood. Camping! Specifically, I refer to the at least one a year camping trips I took with my father, a series of adventures that can best be described in one way: It rained a lot.

When we were kids, instead of the usual Boy Scouts, we went with the Indian Guides. These days, they renamed themselves the YMCA guides to avoid uncomfortable connotations of the last name, which is hilarious when you think about it. Either way, it didn't matter, because after a few years, we graduated to Trailblazers, the version for junior high or older kids. In general, we were not the most intense members of the organization. We did the camp outs and some of the events, but by and largely we ignored the administrative levels. Not that my dad didn't try. He even went to great lengths at times, like when we had to whittle/carve a block of wood for racing and artistic purposes. Ours always sucked for speed reasons, but creatively they were very impressive, and looking back I have to really respect my dad for the effort.

The camp-outs, though, were often minor disasters, not that it was often his fault. The winter ones were often set up at outrageous cold weekends, meaning we spent much of the time shivering in barely insulated cabins. The summer ones fared slightly better, even though we relied on tents and not the RVs some members did, and I was pretty picky about breakfast food. His attempts to make scrambled eggs always were a bit too burned for my liking, for example. The best ones, at least in terms of activities, were the Indiana Beach trips. We still used the tents, but we then had both an arcade and an amusement park to kill the rest of the time. Or at least we would if the weather ever liked us. Day 1 was usually fine. Day 2 was usually okay, which was good, as that was usually the day we visited the park. But we returned to the tents as it got dark, and then the rained started. Every. Single. TIME!

It didn't just rain, oh no. It poured constantly until we huddled under tarps to avoid being drenched. There were times we abandoned the tend and slept in the minivan. There was even the time I collapsed from exhaustion well before it was time for that, which honestly was a blessing if it meant you were going to sleep in a minivan anyway.

But like many of the things in my childhood, I didn't realize how much work went into it or appreciate it until it was much later. My dad, to put it mildly, did not have a happy childhood, and this was one of the many ways he tried to do better than he had it, to succeed as a parent. I wanted to say that, knowing what I do now, it was a good idea, and however much I whined, it was fun. I enjoyed the canoeing, even with the times the river was so shallow that we got stuck and the frequent capsizing. I enjoyed the camping experience, even if a lot of the other kids were jerks or creepy. I even enjoyed some of the food.

I didn't enjoy the rain, though. Oh, and sorry my friend discolored much of the tent with food coloring.