Camping - At my age I ought to know better

- June 22, 2016

I thought I’d done with camping and caravanning a long time ago. I’d had enough of crawling about on hands and knees looking for a torch in the darkness of a tent in the middle of the night to light the way to the toilet – or sometimes a convenient bush.

No more shouting “keep off the sides of the tent” at everyone in hearing distance so that the deluge of rain, that usually begins before the tent is even erected doesn’t soak through. Enough of spending the majority of what is supposed to be a ‘holiday’ folding and unfolding sleeping bags, blankets and towels and dodging precariously strung lines dripping with wet washing. Gone the days of sitting around a single gas burner stove that takes an hour to boil a kettle and even longer to cook 2 rashers of bacon and an egg.

At my age I ought to know better. But it seems that once the idea of the open road and the freedom of the outdoor life is in your blood it never leaves you.

My first experience of a tent way back in the times of Andy Pandy, Enid Blyton and Eye Spy books was, like many children in those long ago days, sitting under the living room table with a the table cloth draped almost to the floor. Many a plot was planned and plenty of secret information gained and stored by me and my siblings whilst in that position. The grown ups had no idea that we were camped there and listening into conversations – or so we thought.
When he was aged about ten (so I would have been seven) my brother was given a white cotton tent with wooden poles for his birthday. Two ropes with a peg, one for the front and one for the back and 4 pegs to hold down the corners. Groundsheets were unheard of and anyway it was always warm and sunny in those summers, wasn't it ?

The excitement that this gift brought about was immense. One day the whole family took two buses to Hylton Castle, with the tent and picnic supplies and 'camped' beside the River Wear for a few hours. Heaven could not have been sweeter.

My jealousy that my brother was allowed to camp out overnight in the back garden with a friend knew no boundaries ... until after much whining me and my friend ,who was my brother's friend's sister were given the go ahead to sleep in the tent one night. As we couldn't wait for this experience, we settled ourselves to sleep at around 6pm. By 9pm we had decided that there were too many strange events happening around us when we were only separated from monsters, ghosts and ghouls by a thin white sheet. The sound of the lawnmower being put noisily away into the garden shed convinced us that it was far too scary to be out here alone, and we retreated to my bedroom for the night.

Since then, I’ve been camping numerous times, graduating from a bright orange one man tent as a teenager in the Lake District, to a blue canvas 'bell tent' and eventually to a 4 berth caravan with 3 children , and loving every minute, even in rain and mud.