The Naked Truth about Camping

Warning: If you don't want to see my bare, 56-year-old ass, don't read to the end of this post.

When I was a young kid, I used to love camping. I have fond memories of Lake St. Peter Provincial Park, just to the east of the southern point of the more massive Algonquin Provincial Park, where we went a couple of times. There were many other times that my older mind remembers, though the names of the campgrounds are forgotten.

Perhaps I enjoyed camping as a kid because my parents would tend to setting up and tearing down, as well as cooking and cleaning. My sisters and I would simply play on the beach or explore the woods. As a family, we'd also hike some short trails.

As a teen, I went camping at Mosport, a motor racetrack south of Lindsay, Ontario, but that was a weekend in Hell that nearly cost me some friendships. From bouts of drunken mayhem, a stabbing, lost items, and a storm that reduced our tent to a mound of twisted metal and canvas, it's best that I forget that weekend ever happened (though it's ingrained in my brain).

Our trusty, one-pole, two person tent.

When DW and I started dating, my love of camping grew. Even though we were responsible for setup, teardown, cooking, and cleaning, we both loved the experience of exploring wherever we went. We invested in decent equipment, from lightweight, easy-to-set-up tents to portable cooking gear, we could easily throw our camp stuff into the car and go wherever, or pack it all into a backpack and hike where no car could take us. We even took camping gear with us, to the UK, when we explored England and Wales.

Many years later, our equipment was still good enough to pack up and take with us when, as a family of four, we canoed from Kingston to Ottawa. Even though we had kids in tow, we still enjoyed camping.

For a while.

As much as my heart liked camping, my body was starting to complain. In my late 30s and early 40s, I found that I didn't sleep as soundly as I used to. When I was young, a bomb could go off next to me and I'd simply roll over. As soon as we had kids, DW and I would both wake up at the slightest sound, making sure our wee ones were okay.

With four people in a tent and lots of forest sounds at night, I found it hard to fall asleep. And because I lay awake in my tent, I discovered that sleeping on a thin mattress, on the ground, was harder on my body. Some nights, I would barely get more than a few hours of restless sleep and would be irritable the next day.

That Kingston-to-Ottawa trip was hard on me.

In 2014, when we travelled to France, we again brought camping gear with us and spent a week travelling from Honfleur, in Northern France, through the Loire and Dordogne, camping all the way. On the last night of camping, when we were in Beynac-et-Cazenac, with a beautiful castle above us, we sat in a restaurant and I lovingly told my family that while I loved them dearly and cherished our time together, this would be my last night in a tent.

Yes, this was the view from our camp site in Beynac-et-Cazenac, in 2014.

If they loved me back, they'd never as me to camp with them again.

DW asked me again, last year.

I have to admit that as much as I love my kids, I have discovered that I don't like camping with them. I still don't like sleeping on the ground in a tent, having bugs attack me at every turn, or cooking and cleaning outdoors, but there are aspects of camping that I still enjoy. I enjoy the beauty of nature and falling asleep to the sound of chirping bugs and the call of a loon.

I love the locations where camping takes us: I just don't like the technical aspects of camping.

There are lots of things that I loved about camping, this past weekend, on Stratton Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park. Here's a list:

• kayaking around gentle, beautiful green hills
• sitting by the edge of the lake, after sunset, and having a beaver casually swim along the shore a few feet away
• being far enough away from other sites that I could change my clothes outdoors, rather than struggling in a small tent
• watching a full moon (not mine) rise over the trees and reflect over the lake
• the smell of dried pine needles, burning in the campfire
• the croaking of a nearby bullfrog
• the call of a loon
• exploring and photographing the High Falls water slide

There are lots of things that I didn't love, including

• being bitten by mosquitos and deer flies at every turn
• trying to figure out a bug tarp for the first time and finally giving up
• using a thunder box, being careful not to brush past the poison ivy that grew around it
• using a thunder box, period
• trying to fall asleep with moonlight flooding the tent
• trying to fall asleep on ground that was at a slight slant (but was the flattest part of the site)
• trying to fall asleep near a frog that croaked every minute or two (and hearing other frogs, kilometers away in several directions, answer the call)
• worrying that our bear bag was high enough in a tree and far enough down a branch to keep bears and other critters away

Do the bad aspects of camping outweigh the good? I don't know. The biggest obstacle in camping is that I don't get enough sleep and I wake up sore. I don't think that's going to change, especially as I get older.

DW has booked us one more camping trip this year, which will be next month and takes us to the northern shores of Georgian Bay. She's also looking ahead to next year, but I've told her to hold off on those plans until this year's excursions are over.

I love being out in nature. I can feel that I'm at one with nature. I'm just not sure I can live in it.