Camping and Stuff

Batman Says:

Raise your hand if you like camping 🖐🏼🖐🏼. Peach and I are, and pretty much have always been, fans of camping which is another one of the thousands upon million of reasons I love her. Her family, like mine, were brought up as campers. Cars were packed up stuffed full of tents and paraphernalia as well as kids, then off to some spot, usually a known place where they feel comfortable, and the camping set up begins.

Dads all over the world will get this..the frustration level increases to just before nuclear meltdown stage right about the time the !*%!%**%#! tent is finally up. Then when the blood pressure comes down from the stratosphere, the relaxing can commence.

I have fond memories of all night fishing trips on the river where we kids were forced to finally go to sleep in a huge old Army GP medium tent that my dad and uncle put up (can’t do it anymore as there are bleepin houses where we used to camp). But anyways, they were fun trips. Also remembered are the trips early in Peach and my marriage with the rug rats all crammed in a small tent, nothing could make these trips or the memories of them better that they are. Road trips to the camping spots also hold many fond memories along the way. We once stopped off in the Echota Cherokee Capitol Historic Site in Georgia and wandered around old log cabins and buildings where old settlers lived. No school classroom on the planet could replace the effect of actually being there, feeling the wood, seeing how the Cherokee people lived and survived in a completely different environment than they were use to….(I feel a squirrel running by). Our boys were products of both private, then public, and finally home schooling (Peach is a wonderful and patient teacher with the smarts of one of those people with all the alphabet letters attached to their names, and she came by her wisdom the right way, she lived and learned). I will not bash any form of schooling, I just believe that learning math you can use, English you can speak, and the history of your country as it was not as someone thinks it should have been, prepares kids better for real life than study guides set down by committee (you take God out of the equation, you aren’t worth the paper all those alphabet letters behind your name are printed on), just my opinion, again I’m not trying to change yours so don’t try and change mine. Told ya, Squirrel!

Anyways, we explored several places along the way to that camping excursion, and we learned a lot. Some of the trips were hot and sweaty, some cold to the point of ice, all were trips I would not change for anything in the world. I believe the time out in the fresh air, be it at a spring and river, or on a mountain top, did wonders for myself and the family. Working together to set up camp, exploring, building the camp fire and keeping it going, cooking meals, cleaning up, all have their places. Gathering around the fire at night roasting marshmallows or other stuff, talking and laughing, it freed the soul of stress. The downside to any of it, if there is one, is that it never seemed to last long enough, before long it was the night before packing up and going back home. Everyone’s movements slow, but time speeds up. No one wants to leave but we eventually get packed up and away we go, headed back home.

Seldom were there trips that we did not have a really nice time. It seems camping and the trips to and from always seemed to agree with us. Everyone returned with a happy disposition which sometimes lasted well into the week following.

I think the fun of camping is just being together “roughing” it for a couple days as a family. We slow down, we bond as a group, we “Live, Laugh, Love” and repair ills that society piles on us.

Just my opinion…yes you too can “chuck it in the bucket” difference is, I’m not trying to change yours 😉.

“No Peach I did not pack your hair dryer”