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The Great Swampy Outdoors

By Jen

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I'm still waiting for that invigorating feeling I've heard about, the one you get after a sound night's sleep out in the wilderness. The one you get while inhaling the aroma from a steaming cup of coffee, listening to the birds chirp in the wee hours of a dew-soaked morning. Ahhhh. That's the feeling of camping in the great outdoors.

It's not the feeling I experienced on our first "family camping extravaganza" last weekend.

And I do mean extravaganza.

My courageous cousin (let's call him Camper D) offered his rural property to the family for a reunion weekend of sorts. Seventeen of us, including 8 children ages 4-17, showed up to enjoy his hospitality. Some planned to stay two days. We opted for one due to complicated schedules. The weather had been dismal all week and the forecast was questionable but we came anyway. All arrived with tents and lawn chairs and cooking gear and coolers and a grand camping spirit. Hooray!

Then it rained.

No worries, folks, ‘cause Camper D was prepared for everything! (In reality, this was really half-camping, thanks to his ingenuity and the presence of an "emergency cabin" lest the camping gods rebel.) We moved our supper picnic beneath the handy food tent and the garage shelter and proceeded with our celebratory meal.

Even when we discovered part of our handy cooking stove missing, we had no worries. We had a grill and a roaring fire! Then it rained some more. But hey, we had s'mores and popcorn and the Sponge Bob campfire song! When the drizzle slowed, the kids played in the creek and all was well.

Then the door fell off the bathroom. (Hey, I said it was half-camping.) No worries! My husband the faithful engineer came to the rescue and fixed it right up after, well, some to-do and what looked like a concentrated surgical effort.

Then it was time for bed. We trotted cheerily into our tents with our bedrolls and were soon drifting off to the gentle sounds of the babbling brook...and a vomiting child.

The rest is history. The skies opened and pelting, incessant rain turned the sweet little brook into a raging torrent. Thunder and lightening made sleeping impossible and every tent save ours (my husband the veteran boy scout volunteer to the rescue again) was damp or worse.

By 5:00 a.m. the deluge was over, the food tent collapsed and broken, and Camper D's new car was saturated and the battery dead because the windows were left open. Mud was everywhere and smoke hung visibly in the damp air. My brother's family with the sick child was gone before the rest of us could wring out our clothes. As I recall, by the time he left, he was limping barefoot, squishing to the car due to saturated shoes.

Then the sun came out promising a lovely day.

We cleaned up the muck as best we could, scrapped cooking breakfast over the soggy campfire and fixed eggs and bacon indoors while the guys worked on restoring the unfortunate car.

During our post-camping recap, Camper D-who deserves a medal for his bravery--put it aptly, "I had a wonderful time except for the rain, the bathroom door, the waterlogged car with a dead battery, a damp sleeping bag, vomiting and the trashed cooking canopy......and a slight case of H1N1." Ok, not that last part.

So, who's in for next year? Fall is, after all, idyllic camping weather.