Looking for moments

A slightly disastrous camping trip

I tried to do the outdoors. I really did.

As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I was inspired to go camping by Mike Sowden’s post about sleeping outdoors, and I’m also trying to limit my phone use. What better way to get in some real face time with some people I love—and get off the phone—than to get out in nature?

I took inventory of the camping equipment I had, and I bought some of the things I was missing (secondhand, because fuck capitalism). I checked and rechecked the weather forecast. Checked again. Packed everything into the car.

I made sure we had everything we needed, but I forgot one tiny thing that turned out to be essential. In fact, not having it was the downfall of our camping trip.

Painkillers.

Actually, I had no first aid kit whatsoever.

The trip started off well. We got a good spot near some trees and not too far from the toilet block. We enthusiastically set up camp—my son, my friend, and I—and then headed to the river for a swim. I’m down for river swims in the middle of summer but it’s autumn and it was freezing cold and I’m not THAT adventurous. I stayed with the dog while they jumped off a cliff into the icy water.

Oh yeah, the dog. It was his first time camping. More on that later.

The problem happened sometime between the river swim and making dinner. After the river I stuck my whistling kettle on the gas stove and we waited for what may have been an hour for it to heat up. I’ve had this camping stove for a number of years and couldn’t remember there being any issue with it, but it was agonisingly slow to heat the water. What’s that saying about how a watched pot never boils? This kettle never boiled. We eventually gave up and had hot—but not boiling—not proper—tea.

My son suddenly started complaining.

“I shouldn’t have done your tent pegs too, Mum! Now my back hurts!”

I did not take this seriously at all.

The stove was barely cooking the burgers, so my friend took them to the shared barbecue and cooked them there, while I stayed by the tents chopping up veges and listening to my son complain about his sore back.

After a while it became clear that despite the accusation in his first complaint, he did indeed have quite a sore back. We have no idea why. It’s happened once before in his life and went away after a couple of days. The doctor said it may be posture related but wasn’t anything to worry about.

The trouble was, this time we were out in the middle of nowhere with an electric car that needed charging before we went anywhere, and no painkillers.

I hoped the pain would just… go away. Get better on its own. He’s a fit, healthy teenager. And what else could I do?

I gave him a back massage, we all ate dinner, and I plugged the car in to one of the plugs by the toilet block. It was 8pm and dark by this point, so we decided to go to bed.

The face of an idiot who went camping without a first aid kit. Wearing a rainjacket because not only was it cold, it was also drizzling with rain on and off. The great outdoors, what fun.

To my relief, the dog seemed to know that the airbed was a bed, despite never having been in a tent or smelled my sleeping bag before. He’d spent the afternoon either following me around on a lead, or in a playpen I’d brought. His recall is not trustworthy enough to leave him uncontained, and there were a lot of other dogs around. He would have tried to make friends with all of them. He did pretty well overall, although he slept the entire day following, obviously tuckered out by the novelty of his first camping experience.

So we all went to bed in our respective tents, and the dog immediately curled up and went to sleep next to me. I read my Kindle, because it has its own light, and I always read myself to sleep. Periodically my son would pipe up.

“Mum? It hurts too much to sleep.”

I’d call out words of sympathy—feeling genuine sympathy, but not really sure what to do. I messaged a friend who lived nearby to ask if she could maybe bring us some painkillers, but then I felt bad about asking that as it was getting close to 9pm and it was cold and dark, so I removed the message.

I kept hoping he’d just fall asleep.

Finally it got to 8.53pm, and after another plaintive “Mum, I’m so sore!” I said to him, “OK, do you want to just go home? We have to leave right now—the gate to the campground closes at 9pm.”

“Yes,” came the immediate reply.

We dashed out of our tents. Didn’t zip the doors up. Ignored our shoes in the dark. Called out hasty apologies to my friend for ditching her, and promised I’d be back in the morning. He grabbed the dog, I unplugged the car, and I drove barefoot out of the campground. We made it through the gate at 8.59pm. The adrenaline!

There was a gas station about 10 minutes’ drive away, and I pulled in to buy some ibuprofen so he could take it straightaway. The car was charged up just enough for the half hour drive home. I drove in my Oodie—which I was sleeping in, it was that cold—and when we made it home we both felt such relief.

Home is so nice. So comfortable. It was warm the moment we stepped in the door. My bed was waiting. I’ve never been a big fan of sleeping bags, and the airbed in the tent was not that comfortable, partly because my tent is so small. I don’t even know where I got this tent from.

Once upon a time I had a huge tent, but it disappeared somewhere along the way. This is one of the troubles with moving so often. Sometimes things get lost. Sometimes when we move I have to make decisions about what stuff we bring, and if it hasn’t been used in a while, I might deem it better sold or given away. I’m guessing that’s what happened to the tent. A year or two of not using it, a house move, a large item… gone. There are some things I regret getting rid of over the years.

But in the morning when I woke up I felt a heaviness, and that’s when I wished we’d managed to sleep outdoors for at least one night. I realised that while I don’t love the experience of going to bed while camping, I love waking up outdoors. The freshness of the air. Crisp mornings. Dewy grass underfoot. That feeling when you wrap a blanket around you as you perch on a slightly uncomfortable chair and eat cereal from a plastic bowl.

Thankfully I still had some of that experience, even if I missed out on the pure moment of waking up in a tent. My son said his back still hurt and he just wanted to go back to sleep, so I left him at home with the dog while I returned to the campsite, and to my friend. (I’m writing this a couple of days later, and his back is fine now, in case anyone was worried!)

Our humble campsite.

My friend had figured out that I hadn’t locked the gas canister into the camping stove properly, so the gas had been trickling out the day before. What a fool. She boiled the water until the kettle whistled, made me that hot cup of tea, and I wrapped a snuggly blanket around my shoulders as we sat and talked for a couple of hours in the fresh morning air.

That was it, right there.

That was the moment I was looking for in this whole—slightly disastrous—trip. This is a friend I see every week, but we always have plenty to talk about. The camping seat wasn’t comfortable but it didn’t matter, because it was the air, and the friendship, and the cup of tea, and the hills of Kaitoke National Park in the background, and the sun that came out mid-morning and warmed our backs.

And I barely used my phone the whole time, too.

Luckily, this has not put me off camping. It’s been two years since I last went camping and I guess this was a trial in a way, to get back into it. Now I know the things I forgot to take, and I also want a bigger tent. We will try again!

If you have any top tips for camping, or enjoying the great outdoors please feel free to share them below!