Camping, Day 1

From the moment we moved to Arkansas Tasha hounded me to go camping. We didn't have a camper or a tent, so the answer is no. She says we can borrow a tent from her parents. This tent has been out of circulation for years and, more importantly, I am not sleeping on the ground in a camping area when I can sleep at home.

We literally live 5 minutes from the lake and camping area. Let's go swim, bask in the sun, build a fire, cook on the grill, do the fun part and go home to sleep. We can get up early and go right back. I can sleep in my bed, shit in my bathroom and take a shower without wearing flip-flops and without being bit by a snake. Isn't that ideal?

No... we have to stay the night to be "camping" so we try mom and dad's tent (it leaks) and buy a tent and blow-up mattresses for comfort. That's funny. Comfort? Have you been to Arkansas in the summer? It is NOT a dry heat. The humidity is so bad you can literally sweat through a pair of clothes checking mail.

Ok, here we go... tent-camping. After the tent is finally up and secure, Tasha unloads the supplies. We brought half the kitchen and apparently all the linen. Maybe we brought all the kitchen and half the linen. Anyway, everything is cool until bed time.

Let me first advise that a tent does nothing for sound-proofing the area you are sleeping in. There's a young crowd down the road at another site that will yell and scream until 2am, and an older crowd all around you that gets up at 5am to rush to the showers in flip-flops, all the while you are up anyway sweating your ass off. If the noise isn't enough, the critters are relentless. They are trained to steal your food in the middle of the night. Squirrels ate through a plastic picnic basket and stole the cookies and then the coons moved in. It's 2:30 am and I just fell asleep, stuck to the mattress from the sweat, and Tasha is running across the camp screaming at a coon that has mastered how to open a cooler and throwing rocks thinking that will deter his efforts.

Are you kidding me? When I woke up (about 6 am) we had all the food in the tent, clothes, the kids, us, and managed about 2 hours of sleep. Didn't I mention we live 5 minutes from the lake? The house is for sale, the cat, the boat, and the tent. I will never do that again unless it's on an island or isolated area somewhere not so humid and with not so wild and trained animal thieves.

Day 2 is tomorrow... even worse (for different reasons).