So, about six months ago, my darling husband first raised the idea of a
driving holiday around Europe. Now, I’m a pretty easy-going person but of all the types of holiday one
can have, camping is at the absolute bottom of my list. Allow me to digress for
a moment and fill you in on my history of camping as an adult:
Firstly, there was tae kwon do camp when I was 19. I probably don’t need
to say much more about this; how hellish it was is fairly implicit. It poured with rain
most of the time and we were in a tiny ‘3-man’ (ha!) tent that required that
your legs be able to bend to enter it…after a couple of days of 6am runs to
the beach, workouts on the sand and ‘proper’ tae kwon do in the afternoons,
this was not a possibility. To avoid getting a wet back from the entrance to
the tent, I had to literally stand a metre away and launch myself,
poker-straight, through the opening and straight onto the airbed, where I lay
and cried…
Next was our work camping trip to lovely Woolacombe in Devon. I was
seven months pregnant so why I even agreed to this I don’t know. Being heavily
pregnant, I went to bed at a fairly reasonable hour but the Hub stayed at the
campfire…drinking… I was woken at some point in the early hours by one of the
guys trying to whisper, “Don’t wake Claire…” I then heard a slump and a groan
and silence. Having called out and getting no response I obviously had to go and check my beloved was still alive. I wish I hadn’t bothered! He was completely comatose
with his head stuck out of one side of the tent and his feet the other. Again,
I should have just left him there. But concerned then-girlfriend as I was I
tried to get him into the tent. However, as he came round a bit he discovered
he was going to be sick and needed to get to the toilet block. The toilet block
was down the hill from where we were camping. I tried walking him down but he
was such a dead weight I couldn’t support him. I had no choice but to drive him
there. Into our little Toyota Starlet GTTB, going as carefully and quietly as I
could down a very uneven track, with Carlo groaning and vomiting on the way.
When we got to the toilets and he emptied his stomach I found him a chair to
sit on by the sink, where he proceeded to doze off, waking himself up every few
seconds by hiccupping… Each time he hiccupped he almost whacked his head on the
tap. I was willing it to happen but sadly he avoided it every time.
My third and most recent camping trip was a couple of years ago when we
went with a dear friend of mine and our families. Nothing really awful happened
on this trip except that, again, it rained a lot and the inside of the tent
roof was damp. It was too low to be able to stand up so getting dressed was
rather awkward and repeatedly resulted in getting wet. Also my friend and I,
despite having known each other since preschool, have rather a volatile
relationship and were alternately fighting and laughing hysterically. Mainly at
my expense… She knows it’s true.
So all in all, my experience of camping has not been great. I’m happy in
a caravan, a cabin, a hotel (obviously), we even managed a successful few days
in a large tepee. But tents are a big no in my book. Not so the husband. His
plan was to get a VW Transporter, buy a huge awning to attach on the side and driiiiiiiiive… I
begrudgingly agreed.
No comments:
Post a Comment