Camping trip number two

For all my rants and raves, whines and worries, I will now stand up and admit it – I like camping.

I like sleeping in a tent; I like just sitting around with nothing much to do; and I like the fact that it can be a quick and cheap little weekend vacation.

I’m always all about taking vacations – I love to travel and don’t like staying at home when taking time off work. Staying at home means ‘getting things done’ and worrying about the things that need to be done. Going on vacation, means scrambling around before leaving, but then leaving all the ‘things that need to be done’ behind.

For many of the last several years, vacations have almost always been visiting places far and wide – in the last five years, Ryan and I have been to Europe, the Caribbean, Mexico, Panama, and New York City. But now, with Austin, vacations are a little lower key and closer to home. And that’s ok with me.

And that’s what’s so nice about camping. It’s going on vacation only a couple of hours from home. But even though we’re so close to home, it’s remote enough and different enough from my real world, to really feel like a vacation. In other words, I’m able to relax, even if it’s just for a short time.

Here’s how we spent the weekend at Presqu’ile (aside from eating and sleeping at the more or less appropriate times):

• Discovering, by reading the little paper the park guys give you on the way in, that ‘gourmet VanHoute coffee’ is served at the park store and then strapping Austin to Ryan’s back and all five of us making the 1km or so walk to the store…yes, just for a cup of coffee
• Napping
• Hiding from the rain – yes camping trip number two saw just as much rain, if not more, than camping trip number one. Thankfully our friends have a screen room tent that we quickly converted into a snazzy rain shelter tent. Undoubtedly, during the 4 or so hours that it rained, we all got a little cranky, but we survived!
• Chasing Austin around the site and down the roadway.
• Eating really good food – again I say who says camping means hamburgers and hotdogs!
• Watching Catherine jump into Lake Ontario, fully clothed (we dared her to and she did!)
• Watching Austin absolutely love standing knee deep in the water.
• Sitting around the campfire drinking beer and/or polishing off a couple of bottles of wine.
• Roasting marshmallows.

In all honesty, I’m almost a little sad that this is the last camping trip for the year. I know there’s lots of summer left, but, for the most part now, our weekends are all booked up until mid-September. And although we could camp then, it may be a little too cold to do so – and besides I wouldn’t mind using some of the weekends in September to finally get back to work on the backyard project. (The weeds are starting to take over the backyard again, and well, there's still no grass.)

So for now, I’ll dream of my next vacation – a cottage on a lake near North Bay for the first week of August. It’ll be a nice change from camping, because when it rains, we’ll have a real roof over our heads!