Location Taken: Cypress Hills Provincial Park, Saskatchewan
Time Taken: June 2010
I’m quite fond of camping. I blame it on my Mom, of course. She’s the one who dragged me to all sorts of campgrounds when I was younger. And by younger, I of course mean “younger than I am this very second”, since the last time I camped with my Mother was last November.
Most of my recent camping has been one-night stops on long road trips, where we pulled into a campground when others would pull into a hotel. Which usually means arriving with just enough light to set up the tent, then driving in the dark to find a nearby place to eat. Or, in one case, seeing that we wouldn’t get to the campground in time and reversing that order. It’s fun setting up a tent with nothing but headlights to see by!
I’ve had longer camping trips in the past, and my family even lived in a campground for a month or two after we moved to Maryland, as Dad started his job before we found a house to rent. But that was when I was quite young, and has largely faded from my memory.
Camping has a lot going for it, especially if you go for tent camping in obscure State Parks and the like. You’re in a lovely place, surrounded by only a handful of other people, and you can explore as much or as little as you like. If you want to run down to the local river and go wading, you can. If you just want to curl up in your tent with a good book, that’s just fine. You’ve stepped away from your busy life and into a different world, one run at a slower pace. It’s quite pleasant.
Now if only more campgrounds had internet…
We lived in a campground for only a week. My new job in Maryland started in July, but my old job in Portsmouth, Ohio, ended in June, so we drove over to Maryland and spent a week camping in Millersville, Maryland, to find a house to rent. You were six years old.
That is not the first time your mother and I did that. We had done it two years before to find a house to rent in Marquette, Michigan. But we left you and your sister with grandparents that time.
One problem with this method was that cell phones were uncommon in those days and we did not have one. When people said to leave a telephone number so they could call us back, we could not.