Happy Camping
5 minute read
I was six when my parents packed all of four of us into their camper van and drove all the way to Italy’s boot. I remember the thrill of those long dark tunnels along mountain passes, singing songs the entire way (God bless their patience). I remember tyres melting from the incredible heat and the pizza – even at the age of six I knew good pizza. My parents were lefties with a yellow Volkswagen campervan to show for it. We would fight over who got the hammock which dangled precariously over the back seats (car safety in the 80s left a lot to the imagination).
We travelled all over Europe stopping at various campsites, under the gaze of Mount Etna in Sicily and skirting the edges of the French Alps, unzipping canvas by serene lakes and rolling rivers in Italy, stopping at roadside stalls to stock up on fruit. They were the glory days: you’d make friends with kids without a communal word between you, you’d disappear for hours exploring, and at night sit around a fire, singing songs, while it licked against the vast, starlit sky. In the mornings, we’d crawl out of our hot tents and into the lake for a swim before breakfast. It was the scrappiest of holidays, the definition of the simple life, running wild and free, no phones, or technology, my father with his gigantic Michelin road map and pidgin French navigating his way through the country, delightfully.
Like most kids, I never fully appreciated the schlep they had to endure. As kids, we inhabit a world of our own, unaware of adult responsibilities but camping is a hard-working holiday in some respects: ferry rides, long drives with us, as well as our cousins, across a continent, shouldering car sickness and annoying songs on repeat. My sole gripe on those holidays was the stand-up toilets, which not only scared me but haunted me for life.
Only recently, as I prepared for my first family camping holiday in forty years, I started to fully appreciate the amount of work my parents did to get all of us, and a home on wheels, on the road.
My mother admitted she started packing and preparing weeks out. We were only heading down the road to Wicklow for two nights but our house, and car, looked like a family of racoons had broken into us.
My husband, a former scout, was intent on reliving his youth, insisting we did not need a new tent and could all squeeze into his 35-year-old scout tent, which happened to fold neatly into a backpack. This, and the fact that we could erect it in our kitchen, should have been clear giveaways. I went along but the prospect of makeshift beds and long-drop loos were starting to lose their shine and there was a niggling thought that ‘being cosy’ (his words) might not be as fun as he was making it sound. We arrived at the campsite to a sea of multi-coloured canvas, each one resembling a small home. I scanned for any structures that resembled our ‘antique’ tent in size and shape. Suddenly, under a nearby tree I saw one, and to my delight, a family of five standing next to it. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.
And then, a large dog emerged from it as one of the kids screamed “No Sam, get back into your own tent”. “We’re sleeping in a dog tent,” I whispered to my husband between gritted teeth as he looked sheepishly at me. Our first night was, hands down, the worst night’s sleep I have ever had, nose to canvas all night with an occasional knee in my back and the uneven hard ground reminding me of exactly where I was. My kids still declare it was the best night’s sleep they’ve ever had. God bless their flexibility.
But as I sat drinking my morning tea by the river I started to remember the good bits. That first cup of ‘camping tea’ which can’t be beaten, the comfort of silence in an age of toxic politics and negative news cycles.
Seeing the kids skimming stones on the river, knocking about with other kids, playing games until dark without so much as a mention of screen time. No agendas or activities, just an opportunity to ‘be’ with little interruption.
The following night, our friends arrived with their eight-man tent and I banished my husband to their ‘porch’, which could have swallowed ours three times. I slept marginally better but as I lay there at 6am listening to the birds and the gurgling river, I realised I’d enjoy it a lot better if it wasn’t ‘so cosy’. Several weeks later we returned with our new and improved outdoorsy home: an eight-man Vango tent complete with ‘porch’. “This isn’t proper camping,” my husband claimed, somewhat sulkily, as he fired up his 35-year-old trangia for the tea.
He has a point, camping shouldn't be about owning the latest trendy gear or fretting about whether you'll have mobile reception; it's fundamentally a state of mind but if it’s also about waking up with a child’s foot up your nose and a back that feels like it’s been carrying breeze blocks all night then I’m all for the trendy add-ons. This year, we took our trendy tent out west to Clare and spent four nights in the wilderness of Pure Camping, a lovely eco campsite where the atmosphere was less structured, more wild and free. It was our third camping trip and we were starting to get the hang of it. Humans have a terrible propensity to do, rather than be. I, for one, have to remove myself from the race in order to slow down and switch off.
There, among the wildflower meadows and woods, I realised that the clip of time is brutal and doesn’t wait for you to slowly realise it.
Kids grow up in a blink and exposing them to the outdoors, the simple life and nature can help shape their perceptions. Hours whiled away doing nothing but chatting, drinking tea and listening to nature while the kids got lost in the woods is, in my view, the ultimate jump-off and a chance to connect to what’s important. Why it took me forty years to rediscover my love of this simple life, I don’t know. Life’s pace has a way of pulling you off track while keeping you on it but sometimes all it takes to reset is a few days simply roaming, sleeping, eating, waking, stargazing and just sitting … all on your own terms.
Orla Neligan, July 2022
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