Ah-Clem's Wanderings: Family Camping: The Saga

This is a long one, fill your coffee cup or refresh your drink before starting.

Meanwhile back at the family vacation …

I have been a camper all my life. I remember going camping with my family when I was very young, and we continued to go on family camping trips at least once a year for as long until the time. I moved out of the house n my youth I was in Boy Scouts, where we camped frequently and sometimes very miserably, but that is a story for anothertime. Even after al of that that I continued to hike and camp well into my 20’s. I don’t do much of it these days, but I still enjoy it.

I am not sure how my parents did it back in the 50’s and early 60’s. We would often head out for a week at the ocean, or somewhere in the mountains or to the eastern side of Washington State. There were 8 of us kids plus equipment all crammed into and on top of our 1956 Chevy Station wagon. It was before the days of seat belts, and we would be stacked like cordwood in and about the seats and contents of the car. It always seemed like we drove for days to get to campground, but I am sure it wasn’t more that 4 or 5 hours at most. It was also before the days of nylon tents and lightweight camping gear. I remember our tent being this monstrous (remember it had to sleep 2 adults and 8 children) smelly canvas umbrella tent that weighed 50 lbs and was a chore to put up. The cooler was had a steel outer shell with an aluminum interior. There was also the plywood camping box that my grandfather built, that was full of drawers and cubbies for holding al t he dishes and other cooking utensils. Cooking was done on a 2-burner white gas Colman stove that you had to make sure you kept the tank pumped up or it would go out.

Example of an early mid-period umbrella tent.

To this day I cannot imagine going camping with 8 kids and cooking over a camping stove for a week. It’s not like tending to that many kids is a picnic to begin with. But to drag them all out in the woods with the dirt and the bugs and the rain seems like madness in retrospect. But we loved it and we did it year after year. What is more we often camped with our aunts and uncles and their families of 8 kids all in adjacent campsites.

It was a blast.

So that brings me to the present day. Obviously the family group outings made an impression on me, as it did on of the rest of my siblings, many of whom are still camping fools, and I mean that in the most affectionate way. A couple of them have camping trainers, but more than one still prefer tents, and they are known to go camping pretty much any time of the year from April to October.

So it is that every summer we all try to get together for one big camping trip reminiscent of those ones many years ago. With the exception of one sister who doesn’t join in for her own reasons, we all gather in late July for the ‘Camping Trip’. We come in From Boston and one sister and her family travels from the Bay area in California. There are now 4 generations that go if you include my brother’s 2 year-old granddaughters, all told it is around 30 people and numerous pets.

The biggest difficulty is choosing the location. Normally we try to go one of Washington States wonderful state parks, but they are so popular that one has to make reservations several months ahead. And trying to get 6 or 8 adjacent sites is difficult if not impossible, and this past year we just weren’t able to organize it in time it so we punted and decided to stay at a KOA campground that the family was familiar with. It was a nice campground but is geared more towards the motorhome / trailer set. Many of then seem to be retired folk who spend a portion of the year on the road with their big rigs.

During our 4-day stay I saw more than one paint-to-match trailer and truck combo, as well as a couple that were actually bus bodies built as motor homes. With all the pop-outs and pop-ups, I think the actually floor space on some of these rigs may be more than that of my house. That hardly seems like camping, and many of the people seldom leave the confines of their vehicles. Did I mention the satellite disk farm at one end of the campground where they could all get an unobstructed view of the southern sky? That ain’t roughing it to me.

Searching for a signal

On the other hand the campground had a swimming pool, a miniature golf course, and other things to keep kids occupied. In addition they also had a handful of cabins, which my mother, sister and her daughter stay in. mother enjoys the experience, but at age 80 she doesn’t feel the need to sleep in a tent on an air mattress. My sister’s daughter is disabled, and it is much easier for her to forgo the tent and sleeping bag thing as well. But the best feature of this location is that all of all the campsites in our area were situated so that we had a common area between us. That is perfect for group gatherings and easy access to others campsites.

So what do we do when we go camping? Mostly we hang around with one another, browse and graze the food from the other campsites and let the kids run wild. At the same time we try to find things to do such as outings to some local towns or historic/interesting locals. Of course there is always mundane things like hikes and swimming.

This year it just so happened that it was the summer festival in the nearby town of Concrete, and there was a ‘fly-in’ at the local airfield the same weekend. Concrete, founded in the early 20th century it was a nearby lime quarry that gave it it’s name and its leading industry. The cement plants are long gone, but the town manages to survive on supplying local farmers and vacationers. Several cars full of us trundled off down the highway to the event. The main street of town was lined with a few dozen booths hawking everything from food to ‘antiques’ and local crafts. At one ‘antiques’ booth Mrs. purchased a handful of old jewelry that she thought she could take apart and reuse the bead. The boy also talked us into buying him an old Argus camera. While my wife was looking over some skeins of bead for sale at another craftsperson’s booth, my mother, gregarious to a fault wandered by and struck up a conversation with the woman running the booth. Within a few minutes it was established that the woman was in fact the daughter of some long lost friends of my mothers. A short and happy reunion ensured, telephone numbers and email address exchanged and in the process the woman gave my wife a great deal on beads that she had been looking at. We later joked that this happens all the time when we go out with mother, she knows everyone, and remembers everything is always finding some shirttail cousin or long lost acquaintances. A couple of years ago on similar trip in the small town of Roslyn Washington while wandering through a local antique store, conversations with the proprietress established that that the woman was a close high school friend of her younger sister. It has to be a gift.

Exhausted from that experience, some of us decided to head across the highways to the airfield to check out the ‘Old-Fashioned fly-in’. It was better attended than the street fair, and had a lot more participants. The airport is a public airfield with a dozen or more hangers lining the airstrip. This was obvious the big event of the summer, the hangers we open to the public and many were filled with older cars and planes, almost all restored and in beautiful condition.The airstrip itself was lined with well over 100 small aircraft of varying ages several of them dating to before WWII.

As we ambled along admiring the planes we were treated to regular take-offs and landings as well as the occasional buzzing by pilots doing a flyby on the airstrip just feet away from us. The younger kids in the bunch quickly grew tired of the airplanes, for them the big hit was the mini donut booth that sold them by the sack full. A sister-in-law who will remain nameless purchased enough I thing to feed the whole campground.

Just by chance our son has a female cousin just 6 weeks on either side of him in age. (There must have been something in the air that autumn 13 years ago.) The two girls live within a few miles of one another, and see each other all the time. The boy of course lives 2800 miles away on the other side of the country. In past years, during our visit the three have run together like pack animals. We were a little concerned that with them turning 13 and with that little stage called puberty hitting them all pretty hard, that the old childhood bonds might have come unraveled. We should not have worried; it was like they had never parted. They were still thick like thieves, and were inseparable with the exception of the times that the two girls would start swooning over the Jonas Brothers. It was just too much for the boy, and he would wander off by himself at those times

I am no sure whose idea it was, but someone suggested that they be allowed to share a tent together one night on the camping trip. Surprising as it may seem, it got general approval among the relative parents. We set up a spare tent in the open space between all the campsites, and brother Pete cleverly concealed a walkie-talkie on the outside of the tent. This was a wise choice as the kids chattered and giggled well into the night, sometimes loud enough for all to hear. When the giggle-chatter got to be too much, Pete would key in the radio tell them all to quiet down. It worked like a charm, but I don’t think any of them got to sleep before 1am. This is not the start of a tradition of letting them all sleep together in the same tent for one night from now on, believe me.

Three in a tent

As is a tradition in the Northwest, the weather turned and we had a day of rain. That never deters the northwest camper; anyone who doesn’t own at least two folding canopies and several blue tarps is just not a serious camper. In our case, all of that deployed when we were setting up camp. We just moved our camp chairs from around the fire pit and under the nearest canopy. It did not deter the children from having fun either. The campground had a bouncing pillow which is essentially a larger rubber tarp stretched and sealed around the edges. A fan pumps air into it and it fills enough to be a sort of trampoline. The kids discovered that the rain made it slippery, turning in into a giant trampoline / slip and slide.

They jumped and slid until they were exhausted and soaked to the skin. Thank god the campground had hot showers and a laundry room or we might have never warmed the kids or seen their clothes dry any time soon.

I have gone on long enough here so I will save you a blow of further events. There were other group activities for the children including a tie-dye shirt project for the children, as well as the annual ‘try to cover your body including your face with temporary tattoos’ competition. The adults mostly confined themselves to eating and drinking. Tequila is the beverage of choice, and we had the usual ‘shots’ night, where the shot glass, bottle and lime are passed around This no longer a competition, as past years that has produced some embarrassing but very funny behavior that no one would remember except for the video. Now that a lot of the kids are older, it is just too hard to explain ones behavior to them the next day. We now keep it to a couple shots each, a nice buzz and lots of laughter and good stories. I don’t recall mother doing shots, I think she just sits, watches and wonders when we are all going to grow up. It has been a long wait so far.

One of the major tasks we undertake at annual camping trip is the group photo. This is the official record of the gathering and has become a nice way see how the kids have grown over the years. It is no easy task to get 30 people in several different families and associated pets to sit still long enough to get a good photograph. Of course everyone has their own cameras that need to record the scene. There is a minimum of 4 but usually more like 6 or 7. They are all propped on some object such as a picnic table or stack of camping coolers or something to get the right height. The timers then have to be set; this is delicate operation, as it has to be done with out jostling the camera some of which have wedges of wood or paper under them to achieve the finer alignment. The final step of firing all of the shutter buttons fell to brother Bruce and I this year. This is a task of fine timing as one has to hit the buttons on several cameras very quickly and then race back the group and pose nonchalantly while waiting for the phalanx of cameras to fire. Inevitable one or two misfire on the first try, either firing too soon and catch us running to our place in the photo, firing too late after every one thought they were done, or not firing at all leaving everyone waiting like it is a firecracker with a slow smoldering fuse. Either way it never takes less than 3 tries to get a (hopefully) good photo. With five or six cameras the odds are pretty good that someone will, get a decent shot, but we have been skunked in the past.

The final result. If anyone wants to know who all these people are, you are going to have to email me.

The final task is the discussion, ‘Where do we go next year’. We have thrown out a few names of locations, with some pros and cons for each but no final decision was made. Come October when reservations have to be made we will heat up the Internet with more detailed discussions. And that brings us all back to the beginning…..

I can’t wait ‘til next year….

And now a few random photos...