Happy Campers

 Our family was never really into camping - closest we came was, before we had children, a booking for Fundy National Park in New Brunswick that we cancelled due to poor forecast. I always maintained that we didn't have the space for all the gear in our home with limited storage space. 

But after the umpteenth summer of trying to find a reasonable accommodation for a week of cottage living that wasn't going to bankrupt us, I began to daydream of having a little camper to call our own. Sleeping on air mattresses on the ground isn't my jam, but neither is the expense of a larger trailer and something with which to tow one. I dreamed of a tent trailer much the same way that my parents dreamed of a tent trailer when I was little. 

I let my interest grow, mentioning it only in passing last fall to my husband who looked shocked but didn't shoot me down.

Then, in March, I approached K more seriously about getting a camper instead of renting increasingly-pricey cottages each summer. We decided we'd casually look for an older pop-up camper until the right one came along.

In April, the right one came along via Facebook Marketplace. It's old - old as me at thirty-six. But it still works, is easy to set up and tear down, and has introduced our family to camping. I put a lot of work and money into maintenance and gear acquisition this spring, sourcing what I could from thrift stores (pots/pans), family members with duplicates, and buying new when it was necessary. We've done two weekend trips so far, with a week-long trip coming up in early August. 

1986 Jayco pop-up camper, remodelled by previous owner

Camping is certainly a lot of work, but now we've got a fair amount of kit stored in the camper itself and that means we only need to think about clothing and food each trip. In spite of all the preparation and then all the clean-up afterward, I have found each trip restorative. Spending all day outdoors, the kids running off with campground friends, swimming when we can, not worrying about bedtimes because we'd rather the kids sit by the campfire and toast marshmallows with us - it's absolutely more than I could have hoped for. At the end of each night both kids just pass out and sleep so soundly. Do the adults sleep well? Certainly not the first night of each trip. But that's okay, we've survived.

Our set-up as of the June 23rd camping trip

Maybe in a future post I'll detail more of the work I've put into our camping set-up, but for now I was just so excited to put it all into words. 

Do you like camping? Are you a tenter or a trailer kind of camper?