We Thought We Were Done with Car Camping
Until we weren’t …
We figured we were done with car camping. After all, it’d been roughly 18 years since we hauled the kids and all our gear to camp near Mt. Rainier, Mt. Baker, Mt. St. Helens, and Crater Lake, showing the kids this lovely area we’d moved into. But then the kids got busy, our jobs got more demanding, and camping kind of fell by the wayside.
Okay, okay, maybe we also got a little too hoity-toity for camping. I mean, once you fancy yourself someone who can stay in a condo in Hawaii, or at a swanky hotel in Zermatt, or in a tiny-house AirBNB on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, you start to ask yourself whether you really want to pitch a tent, swat bugs, and cook on an old Coleman two-burner stove? I kind of wondered if the road from car camping to luxury AirBNB was a one-way street.
But it wasn’t, as we discovered out near the end of Entiat River Road in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, with the last possible AirBNB fading in the rear view mirror. We had nothing but woods and a flowing river and mountains rising up on either side of the valley. The air smelled and felt different and the sun promised to drop behind the ridge line well before it got dark.
No people. No internet. No distractions. I read an entire Agatha Christie novel in less than 24 hours, a 24 hour stretch that also included nine blissful hours of sleep and a nine-mile hike!
The Perfect Site
We had reserved our site online for the Lake Creek Campground, based on what could only be called a cryptic diagram (see below). Look at this diagram: which site would you choose? I defy you to generate a strong rationale for one site over another—but hey, we did.
We chose Site 14, for obvious reasons.
And it turned out pretty great: nicely spaced from the other sites, big picnic table, and a sizable and very flat spot for our tent. Lucky us! It wasn’t very close to the river, but what the hell. We set camp. This tent is new to us, so we’re still figuring out how to set it up, but it only took us 30 minutes.
You have to understand, if you put any little challenge in front of me and Sara, we will attack it in opposite ways. Take folding a blanket, for example. We start out okay—we both grab two corners and bring them together—but then I fold left and she folds right and we both look at each other like “what are you thinking?” Same with tent poles—I think she’s laying them out in one order (which is, I think, the logical order), but she’s got another in mind, and so we end up all criss-crossed with the tent half up. We’ll get better with time, but for now: 30 minutes.
Pretty pleased with ourselves and our site, we decided to go on a walk around the campground, just to check it out. And that’s when Sara starts evaluating all the sites:
“… this one is too open … this one doesn’t have a good spot for a tent … oh, look at the one those people got [the only other people in the campground], that looks really great, I wish we had that one … the one next to them, Site 8, looks really good too—but is it too close to them? What if we moved to that site?”
Here is where I started to get a little scared, because I think she’s entertaining the idea of us breaking down our camp and moving to another site. But we continue our campsite tour:
“Site 7 looks good, but it’s really too close to Site 8, so if somebody moved in there, we’d be really bummed, but ooh, Site 6, super close to the river, nice big spot for a tent, would you want to … [she looks at me here, and I’m scowling] … well, maybe we could move here tomorrow?”
I say nothing and on we go, discarding sites 5 through 2 before really considering the merits of Site 1, which is surprisingly cozy and protected, though without a very big tent spot.
And all the while, I’m thinking: what the hell!!! Why can’t we just be happy with the site we’ve got, the one where we already set up all our shit? It feels just like our house, the house we’ve lived in for 25 years, and that we’ve spent many hours and literally hundreds of thousands of dollars making just right, only for Sara to constantly be browsing the real estate listings and calling out to me, “Ooh, here’s a nice place with a view. Wouldn’t this be nice?” And all I can think is “We are not moving, goddammit, so why are we even looking? You’re driving me crazy with anxiety that you’re going to make us move.” And when I occasionally voice such an opinion, Sara says, “Oh, don’t worry, I’m just looking.”
Same with tent sites. Just looking. We stay put. We’re perfectly happy. But next time, she says, next time we’ll know which site to choose!
Recollections of early camping with Tom and Pete’s by their mom include 5 month old Pete in a shoulder pack that I carried on my back hung on a post while we pitched the tent by a river and their dad, awakening in the middle of the night by Tom, who was peeing freely in his face. Tom had a tendency to do strange things in his sleep. Now he just writes about them!!
Dude. This is EFing perfect!!!! I was laughing my ass off because, well...
Let's just say, I can relate.
Thanks for sharing and I'm happy to hear that you two are enjoying yourselves.