Our family enjoys camping. I am not sure where I got the camping fever as we did not go camping when I grew up. We stayed in motels and rode in a big boat called a Ford LTD. Now motels are great for some occasions. But I have never been to a motel where I could roast marshmallows by a camp fire while listening to the birds or the night bugs.

So soon after our second child was born I started hinting to my husband that it would be nice to have a camper or even just a tent that we could go into the wilderness and go camping. I believe we had gone camping with friends and had a wonderful time so thus we now needed a camper too.

We started looking around and we discovered that due to a flood we could buy a cheap camper. We bought a very large Sunline camper that was 34 foot and thankfully Gerry was used to pulling trailers. Back then we were young and had lots of energy. You see the camper had had about 15 inches of water in it even though it was dry when we bought it. It may have been dry but it was full of dried mud. So we (or rather I ) spent many hours cleaning it. After we shook or cleaned all the mud out of the appliances we were surprised to find that everything worked. So now we could go camping in style.

 

We have owned many campers since then and enjoyed fixing them and then selling them.  Several times we have bought driving campers when we took a lengthy road trip. Three years ago we had this joke that we went from our first camper that was the biggest all the way down to tents. We had taken the children tenting since we did not have a camper at the time and they thought that tenting was the way to go. Some of them still enjoy tenting but none of them have been tenting in an all day rain or a bad storm with 4 little children so I say they really haven’t given tenting a fair trial.

The other weekend we went camping with all our family. First of all if you have married or older children make sure you plan way ahead. A few years ago I thought we would go camping only to find out that between the 3 youth they had something planned almost every weekend.  Now I try to plan the beginning of summer which weekend we will all go together.

Every year we try to do something different. Sometimes we want to be by a lake so we can go boating or like last year we had a large camping trip as we took a five week trip to Alaska. (see my blog at Trippingtoalaska.wordpress.com) This year the children requested that we camp near the ocean as some of them had never swam in the ocean.

So we started checking the campgrounds near the ocean only to find out that most of them were resorts and very expensive. So we looked a little further and found a state park. No it wasn’t right by the ocean (12 miles away) but it was lovely with few people and very large camping spots.

We all agreed that it was a successful camping trip as we got to swim in the ocean and relax at the campground. We got to read, bike, and play games. It was a cooler weekend so we could even enjoy a campfire. The only disappointing thing was that the raccoons ate the special raspberry buns that were for us for breakfast!

Yes, we forgot to mention the good eating. We enjoyed all our favorite camping foods but that will have to wait for another post. What are your favorite foods to take camping?