A Weekend in My Unnatural Habitat

Friends and readers, this is how I’m spending this weekend.

Yes, friends, we are camping! Not just camping, but camping for the first time without our children since just after we were married (that’s twenty-two years for those keeping score at home). That means we brought half as much food and twice as much alcohol, and will have just as much fun.

This is how I camp:

To some, this is not camping, but glamping, but to me, it’s the only way to go. When we were dating and for the first half of our marriage, we slept on the ground, in a tent. Around the time I hit my mid-thirties, and seemingly overnight, I became too old to sleep on the ground. So we bought one of these and never looked back.

Every time we’re out here in nature, I’m reminded of that exchange in Titanic, where Leo—er, Jack—starts to explain ice fishing to Rose.

“I know what ice fishing is!” Rose spits out. To be fair, she’s hanging off the back of the ship at the time, so she’s sort of preoccupied.

“Sorry,” Jack says, “you just seem like more of an indoor girl.” (You’ll forgive me if this is not a verbatim transcription, but I did it from memory.)

This will probably not shock many of you, but I am an indoor girl. I may be writing this post sitting in a chair in a forest, but I have a (kind of) indoor bed and toilet, and I brought my Kindle so I can read, and my iPad so I can write and play my dumb game, and am writing this post on my phone and have enough of an internet connection to publish it when I’m finished. I have a strong dislike of dirt, bugs and unchlorinated bodies of water, and I never learned how to swim anyway. I miss my shower and the running water in my sink. My family likes to hike and fish and swim, and I just want to sit in my chair, read my books and maybe take a nap. And eat s’mores.

And I met my husband on a camping trip. I can’t say I didn’t know. He even enjoys backpacking, so sleeping on the ground, and carrying all your shit, and making nature your toilet. No thank you.

Though I am spending time outside my natural indoor habitat, where I am surrounded by all my creature comforts and electronic devices (oh, yeah, I brought most of them with me), I enjoy camping and usually have fun on these trips, despite complaining bitterly about it until we actually leave. I really looked forward to this trip, because it is the first time in about a year (since our last camping trip) that we’ve been away, mostly due to a global pandemic (perhaps you’ve heard?).

Maybe now that our kids are older—we’re a little under a year away from having two adult children—we can plan more trips and put more miles on our motorhome. But I’m not getting any younger, so our tent camping days might really be over. I’m not super upset about that.

So if you’re looking for a thing to make you happy, try camping if you haven’t already. If it’s not your thing, that’s okay, too. It’s barely my thing. Do what makes you happy.