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Camping in the rain

I think there are some of us that go camping because it sounds like a good idea at the time and then there are others of us that go because we can't not.  I must fall into that second category.  Because with all the camping misadventures that I've had over my lifetime, I should learn to just stay home.

The first one that I ever heard about was before I could remember.  My family had gone camping up in the Carolina mountains.  A bear came to check things out during my nap and my faithful dog protected me.  I was probably a baby then, but it was a story my family would tell every so often.

Let's see, the next one I remember is camping on the beach and our friends shirt and six pack washed away in the tide.  More than likely I was a toddler.

We took a break and didn't camp again until I was in elementary school.  I remember the birds ate all our bread when we set up our site and went for a walk.

During those years there were also raccoons, stolen milk, flooded tents in the middle of the night, a couple of cuts and bruises.  But still, I've kept on camping.

Once my daughter was born, we started the misadventures with her.  The first trip she went on, the heat was unbearable.  Luckily, my parents were there with a slide in camper to keep things cool.

On another trip, we forgot the sippy cup and had to leave our site in the middle of the night to go get one because she was not going to go to sleep with out it.

Most recently, we some how stumbled into a family reunion of mosquitoes.  Let me tell you, there were more mosquitoes there than I had ever seen in one place before and I am from South Carolina, but at least down there, we spray the darn things with wild abandon on a governmental level.  Then to just prove what a glutton for camping we can be, the rain came down and washed through our sites.  Most of the group we were with survived okay.  Though I don't know if any of us tent campers were dry until we got home.

But as soon as I got home, I started wondering, when can we go again??? 

Surveying the pond, wondering if we should stock it with trout or not.

Shoes were useless at this point.



I guess I should tell you the moral of the story.  One thing that all this has taught me is that life does go on.  We can survive things that seem insurmountable.  We can lose things, have things turn out much worse than expected, but in the end we carry on.  Camping isn't really about a perfect weekend, it's about a perfect moment, and if you're lucky, you can have tons of those in a life time.

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