Daily writing prompt
Have you ever been camping?
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WordPress dropped a pretty good question today about camping. I love these kinds of open-ended questions and look for to seeing what others have written.

Me? I’ve camped all my life. My father was a teacher in the 70s, and my mom stayed home with us, so we didn’t have much in terms of “things”. Goodwill was a great place to go, and there was a strict budget when we went back to school shopping.

The one thing I feel like my parents spent money on was camping. We had two “four-man” tents (how they would fit four people into these tents is beyond me. However, they gave us lots of room to move around and scatter our stuff everywhere! Our tents were always a mess, or maybe it was just my side! Either way, we had our own space.

We camped all over Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and, surprisingly enough, South Dakota and Wyoming. I remember at least two trips out to the Black Hills in my youth, and there might be a third one there was well. Our tents kept us warm when it was freezing in the mountains, and the trout stream was so cold it hurt to wade in. They did not keep us cool or protect us very well from the storms that rolled through. We came home with bent tent poles after camping in the Badlands.

As I started my own family, we tent camped as well. We drove to the East Coast, camping just outside Gettysburg, where I swear I could feel the armies converging on us. We did our own Black Hills/Bad Lands trip, sharing Devil’s Tower and Crazy Horse with our children. We also shared the cold during that trip as it snowed, and we were WAY underpacked for the weather! Still, those are the memories our daughters talk about when we think back on those trips.

As they’ve grown up and moved out, our camping has changed. During Covid, we took a trip out to western Iowa to explore cemeteries and took along a blow-up bed in the tent. Not really convenient, but comfortable. Next, we took my parents’ “bed on wheels” (a very small camper with no real amenities) to Boston and found that sleeping in a bed vs. on the ground does have its advantages.

Three years ago, we purchased a camper to pull ourselves. It’s a smaller, 20-foot one, but if it’s just us, it fits perfectly. Our only purchase we are thinking about is a generator if we want to camp in more primitive spots. Otherwise, it has everything we need. My only concern is towing it long distances. We’ve got to central Missouri with it, up the Door County Peninsula, and over towards Madison. This summer, our plans are to run it up to Northern Wisconsin, over to Duluth, then up with North Shore. It’s comfortable, it has heat, but the biggest thing, it has a refrigerator that runs on propane. That’s a big deal coming from coolers and tent camping.

So, did we camp? Heck yes! Have our camping needs changed with the times? Also, heck yes! Are we happy with what we have right?

Heck yes! 🙂