The story I was told as a child is that when I was around 2 months old, our family went to church camp. My mother served as camp nurse. We stayed in a cabin that did not have running water but was fairly close to the camp shower house that had two showers and a generator that could be fired up to bring electricity to the camp. The camp cook prepared meals over a wood-fired stove in a dining hall that had been hastily constructed for the Civilian Conservation Corps. The mill slat siding had holes that showed daylight. My father emptied the firewood box for the cabin where we were staying and my folks made a bed for me in the fire box.

I don’t remember that particular camping trip. And I don’t remember any trip as being my first camping trip. Going to camp was simply something that we always did. I spent at least a week at church camp every summer of my life. For the first 25 years we went to the same camp every summer. When I turned 22, I was manager at the camp and my wife was cook. We did that job for two summers while we were seminary students.

I don’t remember ever getting my first sleeping bag. A sleeping bag was something that everyone in our family had. We used sleeping bags for more than just church camp. Our family had a wall tent and we went camping with the tent. Most of the time we would stay at a Forest Service campground with pit toilets. We were used to outhouses. No one ever thought of needing to make reservations to stay at a campground. You just showed up and selected a campsite. We had a two burner Coleman stove that ran on white gas and a lantern that used the same fuel. My great uncle had made a picnic box that fit in the back of our car that held plates, cups, silverware and enough pots and pans to prepare meals. We had an ice chest that kept perishables cool with blocks of ice that we froze in our freezer.

In the first years of our marriage we had sleeping bags, but didn’t own a tent. It seemed to us that it always rained when we wanted to go camping. We got good at making rain coats out of garbage bags that covered our backpacks and we had a tarp that we could rig up for shelter from the rain. We gathered firewood and made fires to cook our meals. By the time we had children, we had a good four-person tent. Sometimes we’d go camping with my mother and take a second small tent. I remember mother playing countless games of “go fish” with our daughter on one trip when we car camped and it rained. We developed a routine. When we reached a campsite, we would work together to set up the tent. Susan would care for the children while I cooked supper. I had a relatively small catalogue of meals I knew how to cook, so camping meant a bit of repetition with food.

When our kids were teens we acquired a used tent camper. It had a two burner propane stove, a five gallon water tank with a hand pump that dispensed water into a small sink. We camped around quite a bit with that trailer. It had two fold out beds with a tent top. There was also a small dinette that could be converted into another bed. The summer that we had our Japanese exchange daughter with us we camped from Rapid City through Yellowstone Park to Boise, Idaho, and on to Portland and Seattle. We stayed out on Whidby Island before camping our way back across Washington, Idaho, Montana and the corner of Wyoming to our home in Rapid City. We never made a campground reservation for the entire trip and always found a place to stay. We found several campgrounds with showers along the way.

When our children were grown and out of the home, we camped with a slide-in pickup camper for a few years before graduating to the bumper pull trailer that we now have. This trailer is filled with luxury items including a bathroom with a shower, a kitchen with a sink, a four-burner cooktop with an oven and a microwave. It has an air conditioner, though the microwave and air conditioner require that we be hooked up to electricity in order to operate. There is also a reasonably sized refrigerator with a freezer that keeps ice cream cold. This camper can sleep a lot of people. There is a bunkhouse room with four bunks, plus a queen sized bed. There is a jackknife sofa and the dinette can also be made into a bed.

We got this camper the year after our first grandson was born and before we moved out to Washington, we pulled that camper out here every summer. Our oldest grandson stayed with us in the camper when he was only two years old. He and his sister stayed with us in our camper when their little sister was born. We’ve made camping a family adventure for lots of occasions. In the summer of 2021, we pulled the camper from Washington to South Carolina and back staying at campgrounds all the way and camping in the trailer in the yard of our daughter and son in law’s home. We had to have reservations for every campground on that trip.

This evening we plan to do a first for us. We have reservations at a campground right next to our home. I’ll pull the camper over and set it up in the early afternoon. We’ll have four grandchildren to fill up all of the beds. We’ve camped with three before, but never have had all of the bunks full. Our daughter will be along for the adventure as well, so we’ll be a total of seven sleeping in the camper. It will be for only one night and the campground does not allow open campfires so we’ll be making s’mores over the camp stove, but we’ll have grandpa’s pancakes for breakfast. We’ll take all of the kids’ bikes and have time to go to the beach.

The kids, however, will be sleeping in beds with sheets. I don’t know if our grandchildren have ever slept in sleeping bags. It’s not quite the same as a row of sleeping bags on the bare ground in a canvas tent, but it will be enough for memories to be made. I hope that the joy of camping rubs off on our grandchildren enough that they will one day take their children camping. At any rate, we’ll have stories to tell for years to come.