So, I’ve been camping a total of 5 times in my life that I can remember. I don’t think I ever went as a kid (I’m defining ‘camping’ as sleeping in a tent in the “wilderness”); the first time I went camping was in 2002 for a String Cheese Incident show with Ben & Kerry. We went three years in a row, first for SCI, and then for Phish twice. All three times were at the Bong Recreation Area in Wisconsin, and all three were in secluded wooded areas. I remember these experiences mostly fondly, although I think a lot of that has to do the fact that we were camping for the purpose of seeing live music at Alpine Valley. The other two times I’ve been camping were two years ago, and this weekend; and both of these experiences were for the purpose of hanging out with friends and for the experience of camping.
When we went two years ago, it was at a campground (apparently called Baker?) that was essentially a big open area with a few interspersed trees, and we all had out tents fairly close together and it was kind of a group camp things. This past weekend was much more like the Bong, where each campsite was enclosed in trees and fairly private. This would have been nice if it was just Meghan & I, but we were with two other couples that we planned on hanging out with all weekend, so having to walk out to the dirt road and then around to their campsites wasn’t exactly ideal. We ended up congregating at one campsite around the fire each of the two evenings and we even ended up going on a group walk on Saturday morning, but it still felt kind of strange.
I have now decided that I really really dislike camping. I think I might consider it again as an alternative to a hotel in a situation where I needed a place to stay for the night, but I can say without reservation that I will never go camping again just for the sake of camping.
Let me try and illustrate my point in the form of lists:
List 1: Things that suck about camping.
1 – Sleeping on hard earth with little padding. Maybe this is just because I’m a heavy dude, but sleeping on the ground in a tent makes my back and shoulders really sore. It’s really difficult to get comfortable and I sleep like crap. It makes me crabby in the morning.
2 – Bugs. Well, duh, right? But, really, aside from the fact that the bugs are annoying to me (and I’m actually pretty lucky, because mosquito bites on my skin go away after a couple minutes, whereas Meghan has little white hills on her skin that last for days), I feel bad that I’m upsetting the natural environment by introducing a whole bunch of bug repellent chemicals and killing off the bugs.
3 – Pure boredom. This is where the difference comes in between camping for the sake of camping and camping as a place to sleep in between awesome concerts comes it. Given that it’s hard to sleep on the hard earth, I tend to wake up fairly early when camping, and, thus, have, like 18 hours in between sleeping where I need to find something to do. And, yeah, walking around in nature is pretty fun and fairly interesting, but for me, that takes up about 2 hours out of a day at most. And sitting around a campfire and bullshitting/drinking is also fun, but that, again, would be maybe 4 hours at most. Throwing in 2 hours worth of cooking and eating, and I’m still left with a good 10 hours with nothing to do.
List 2: Fun things about camping:
1 – Sitting around a campfire and BSing. We did a lot of that this weekend; probably more than is healthy, actually. At one point, one of my fellow campers just randomly decided we should talk about pizza joints, because the conversation was in a lull. Honestly, though, the draw of a campfire is probably the one thing that would get me to go camping again. There aren’t many places where it’s acceptable to gather a bunch of wood and set it on fire. And there’s pure joy to be had in throwing random stuff in the fire to see what happens.
2 – Cooking meat. This is always fun, whether it’s grilling in the yard, or grilling in a campsite. But, that’s the thing. I don’t really need to go camping to do this. I can just fire up the grill in my driveway, and then go eat inside where there aren’t a million parasites trying to suck my blood.
3 – Hanging out with friends. This is really the only reason I’ve ever gone camping. If no one had ever suggesting I go camping or invited me camping, I can almost guarantee I never would gone camping. It’s not something I would take upon myself to go do. And for that, I’m grateful to my friends, because I am a better person for having experienced it. At the same time, I think from now on, I’m going to have to come up with better ideas of things to do to hang out, so I don’t have to suffer the atrocities of sleeping on hard earth and being dinner for insects.
List 3: Random stuff we put in the campfire
1 – Doritos. Dude, those suckers burn for a long time. It’s a fairly good argument for never eating doritos again, because, honestly, it’s a little scary how long they take to burn.
2 – Grapes. They’re not really that interesting to watch burn, but if you have a bunch of grape you don’t want to eat, and you happen to be in front of a campfire, I have a little game I can teach you to pass the time. Also, they cry as burn.
3 – Tilamook cheddar cheese. This one was kind of interesting, because the cheese melted on top of the wood and then just sort of hung out for a while.
4 – Marshmallows. They get bigger, and smell pretty good.
5 – Woods. It burns, duh.
6 – Empty plastic water bottles, cap on tight. We got one to make a popping sound, although there wasn’t much of a significant explosion.
7 – Corn husks. If you put too many in, it can dampen the fire too much and make it hard to maintain. Mostly, it creates a lot of smoke.
8 – Miller Lite can. We only put one in. We noticed that where the fire was really hot, it did seem to actually burn the can, but mostly, it just discolored and changed shape.
9 – Plastic bags. If you’re not careful, and just try to throw them in the fire, they actually just float away.
10 – Bratwurst. Wow. The bratwurst never truly started on fire. It just seemed to cook and cook and cook. Eventually it got black and sort of turn to ash, but I never saw any sort of flame on it.
List 4: Stuff we cooked on the grill.
1 – Bratwurst. Delicious.
2 – Burger patties. Also delicious.
3 – Corn on the cob. Basically, we wrapped the corn in aluminum and grilled it for about a half hour, rotating it every once in a while. I remember, the last time we went camping, we tried corn, except we left it in the husks and put it on the grill that way. We ended up with dry, burnt corn, and it wasn’t very good. This time, with the aluminum, the corn was juicy and delicious, and on the parts that were a little overcooked, the grill basically just carmelized the corn, which gave it a nice sweet flavor, and it was even tastier.
4 – Bacon. I took great joy in cooking up bacon on a grill. One of the couples who were with us had brought the bacon thinking they’d have BLT’s for lunch one day, but once I realized we had burgers, cheese, bacon, and barbeque sauce, I got it in my head to make the awesomest bacon cheeseburger ever. I ended up forgetting to use the barbeque sauce, but I still had a damn fine bacon cheeseburger.
5 – Potatoes a la McDaniels – I’m not sure what all was in it, except chopped potatoes and spices, but we wrapped it in aluminum foil and threw it on the grill. Unfortunately, it apparently needed more cooking time than we gave it, so it didn’t turn out as well as it might have. I felt a little bad, because they’d obviously put some effort into making it and were excited to eat it. It looked awesome, anyway.
I ended up manning the grill for the most part, cooking the brats and burgers. It brought back some memories of cooking at Perkins back in the day, mostly relating to the time management of when to cook what and when to say it was ready. It was fun.
Anyway, the weekend was pretty enjoyable in that we got to hang out with friends, I got to grill, and we got to hang out by the campfire, but given the unfortunate fact of two horrible nights’ sleep and lots of bug bites, I don’t think Meghan and I will be sleeping in any tents anytime soon.