Camping

Saturday,  July 4, 2015

Camping: Come One, all. Angie, one of my softball teammates face booked a campground reservation and sent out an open invitation.
Typically, camping is not in my repertoire.  I used to think camping was a lot of work for the opportunity to just eat ashes and whatever in your food.  The really big reward: I get to sleep on the comfortable, hard ground. My back’s favorite surface.

Why would I want to miss out on the opportunity to lug all the camp gear from the basement to the car? Once sandals hit the ground, it’s one maneuver after another. Put up your shelter. Think hunters and gatherers. Everyone had to work for our food.
Of course, my favorite are the last  phases of the vacation but work-oriented experience: packing up the camp site, loading the car, drive, unload the car. There are still more steps. Soaped down pots and pans, some scorched from cooking on an open fire wait patiently to be washed. The list waiting for cleaning is quite long. Tent, sleeping bags, clothes, dogs, car, and self.
Sometimes I wasn’t sure if there were any rewards after so much work. Camping didn’t even seem normal.
My family never camped. My first experience came when my Brownie troop camped in the leader’s backyard, and that just felt weird. I wasn’t cut out to be a Girl Scout at any level, though I did the “crossover,” moving from Brownies to Girl Scouts. I hated almost everything about the Girl Scouts. The uniform. The idiotic badges. I didn’t want to sew and they certainly were not going to give me a badge for playing
baseball, especially when girls at that time were not even allowed to play baseball.
When my path crossed with Sylvia’s, I was introduced to camping. She had a lit of experience to my zero. I have tolerated camping. She loved it. I didn’t really hate it.
I don’t know what is causing my attitude change,  but I was very excited to go camping. I was packed under two hours, and moving quickly in the morning is not my strong suit.

Getting out of the record high temps was such a extra bonus. Since Eugene temps are supposed to stay high, I told Sylvia to leave me at the Delta Campgrounds for the week and join me for the next weekend. 
I could easily stay close to the Blue Lake Reservoir where fun and frolicking in the water replaced the  agony of melting in the heat.

The dogs had so much fun swimming and playing.
Now I want to know when we can return to camping.