Camping was a joy when I was 25.
We would throw the dirt bikes in the back of the old pickup toss in a cooler with more beer in it than food, pack a few clothes (very few because we didn’t care how dirty we got) and then we were off. We would sleep on old blankets in the bed of the truck, eat Oreos for breakfast (the chocolate with white cream kind, not all these new cookies they call by that name) and come home sore, tired, smelly and in need of a good night’s rest in a bed.
Anything was possible at that age. We could leap to great heights on what are ancient motorcycles now, sometimes having to fish them out of holes or even mine shafts, climb any mountain (or not), and come home feeling like a million bucks.
In our adventures we would see those with camp trailers and campers on their trucks, thinking that maybe someday we would have the luxury of sleeping on a good mattress, have cold food from a propane fridge instead of water drenched morsels from an Igloo cooler, and heaven forbid we might even be able to use modern facilities instead of a log in the woods when that particular daily routine rolled around. We dreamt and hoped that someday we would camp simply, just pulling out the unit and rolling to where we wanted to go without all that packing stuff and planning.
Sometimes, simplicity is best
Well, all you youngsters out there who are thinking it get will easier because you spent a lot of money on toys for camping, you will find it actually in some ways gets harder. Certainly at 65 I wouldn’t really want to spend too many nights sleeping on the ground again even if I had drunk five bottles of Annie Greensprings (a very fine wine of my youth) and couldn’t feel a thing. But never, never, think that owning an RV, dirt bikes, side by sides and four wheelers is easy. The end result of it all is that it is more comfortable, but if my old bones could take it, there are times that I wish I could go back to those days of what I now call simple camping.
So let me tell you about it.
Open your wallet and pour
First you have the payments on all the crap you bought. And about the time something is paid for you gotta have the new thing. Call it a lack of self control if you want, but it is a disease I and many others are afflicted with.
Then there is the licensing of all the stuff you have from the littlest four wheeler to the monster truck you have to pull it out to the wilderness. The state wants bucks for everything you ride or transport that ride on.
Murphy’s Law always strikes too. If you buy new, in the first few week something on the most recent acquisition will go wrong or you will run into something. Your choice of ways to get disgusted by seeing thousands of dollars of investment twisted and torn is endless. Get used to it.
And if you think that every thing you think you need to have a happy camping trip is in that big RV, put that idea in your back pocket and save it for some rainy day that will never come.
Shaw’s incompleteness theorem
Sure, much of what you need (or based on the simple camping life’s philosophy, want) is there, but there isn’t a trip when something is forgotten on the kitchen table or left in another vehicle that didn’t accompany you on the trip.
The simple days of beer and cookies give way to such things as good hydration, proper diet (because now you have no excuse to go off it just because you are camping), and remembering to take enough of the myriad medications that your doctor has put you on to keep you alive to camp again.
Loading is never simple either. Don’t forget the oxygen tanks and the C-Pap machine. Be sure to take that new helmet because a 60 plus year old head apparently cracks open easier than one did at 22.
Keep those sugary and salty snacks out of the RV, and instead eat the bland stuff that will make it so you will live a little longer, but causes you to enjoy it less.
Finally, but not least, is upkeep. The more crap you have, the more things you have to change the oil in, grease, fix tires, replace filters, etc. etc. etc. Go ahead and have a dealer do that full service for you on that four wheeler you love so much. Go to the credit union to take out a loan to pay for it too.
Me, I just do what I can and hope the damned thing doesn’t go down at dusk when I am riding alone 40 miles from the fifth wheel and I skipped dinner to do it.
I am not even sure you can call what we do these days when we own so much stuff to go camping, camping. It’s more like taking your studio apartment with you, but instead of the landlord being responsible for the repairs on the place, you are. And this one has wheels so a lot more can go wrong with it.
I can’t say I really would like to go back to how I used to do it, but I also can’t say that I wouldn’t either.
It truly is all relative, isn’t it?