Camping - the excitement is in tents! The best thing about camping out on the back lawn when you're a kid is that you can get up in the night and go to the kitchen.
Or the bathroom.
Or your bedroom for an extra blanket.
Or your mom's room 'cos you heard funny noises.
Camping out on the back lawn when you're a kid is the way camping should be.
Forget something and you've got a ten second walk to put it right.
If only it were that simple now! I love the whole camping, back to basics, mother nature experience.
It's somehow or other 'elemental' and restorative.
What I can't do, though, is combine this desire for freedom with commonsense logistical organization.
I am the world's worst planner - at work I get away with it by bluffing that I'm an ideas man and leave the boring routine stuff to those better suited to it.
When it comes to camping trips, though - boy, has that got us into some situations.
You wouldn't believe half the problems we've met on our camping trips simply because I've said, 'Hey, it's gonna be a great weekend.
Let's just take the tent and go to the country for a couple of nights.
' We've forgotten, in no particular order, food, flashlights, sunscreen, rain gear, sleeping bags, hay fever tablets, fuel for the camping stove (and once, when we had remembered the fuel, we forgot the camping stove), bug repellent, a map, spare clothes, the entrenching shovel (if you don't know what that is, suffice it to say you don't want to be without one on a camping site with no toilets), the can opener, the poles for the tent, and, obviously, the tent.
We've also turned up at our favorite camping site after a four hour drive to discover it had closed for the summer because the owners had gone on a year long trip.
Yes, I know I should have checked but we didn't know we were going until that day, did we? It's easily done.
Well, in our house it's easily done.
At least - that's the way it used to be.
I now have a nineteen year old kid who's into camping big time and goes off on all kinds of week long treks through parts of the country where you don't see another person for days at a time.
He takes command now; with his lists.
He has lists for everything.
Special Family Camping Trip Lists.
They're very different from his Individual Camping Trip Lists and his Me and the Guys Camping Trip Lists.
We now have three special labeled storage bins - one for camping gear, one for cooking equipment and one for supplies.
Each of the bins is carefully packed with everything - and I do mean everything - we might require.
It used to be my task to regularly check the content of these bins but ever since the time I forgot to put in the new spare flashlight batteries I've lost that responsibility.
Now, we check out camp sites in advance and take extra blankets and don't have a tent that hasn't been seam sealed for three years.
And I haven't had to sleep in the car for at least five years now.
Part of me misses the spontaneity of the old days - that sense of excitement when we checked to see if we'd got the ground cloth for the tent and things like that.
But I don't mind too much; now I've got a nineteen year old kid who looks after me just like my mom did when I camped in the back garden.