In my younger years, I referred to anyone camping in an RV as “not a real camper.” Author and humorist Patrick McManus wrote about camping as A Fine and Pleasant Misery, and this saying rings true much of the time. From frosty mornings spent blowing on cold fingers and stamping feet in damp shoes in a futile attempt to get warm (all while the fire smudges and kids are whining for hot cocoa), to the smoky fires and raw/burnt breakfasts, to crawling into a cold sleeping bag at night, dirty and smelling like bug repellant, camping can indeed be A Fine and Pleasant Misery. And yet… I love it.
I grew up in a camping family. My parents started out with a canvas tent, then moved on to a very basic (and crowded) Coleman tent trailer. My parents had one slide-out bed, my sister and I slept on the other, and my brothers slept on a cot and on the floor. There was no kitchen, no bathroom, and barely room to walk to our beds. I credit my folks for being smart enough to have a travel port-a-potty as part of the set-up with four young children; its cushioned lid was also the step up onto the bed for the girls.
To assemble this trailer on two tiny 14″ wheels (Were they even that big? Go over 50 or 55 mph and they were sure to pop!), you unsnapped the vinyl cover on all four sides, then lifted the wall supports into place and slid out the beds. Next, place the door (which had been riding inside, probably on the floor or the cot we put in there) into its spot. Then you would zip all of the tent material around the structure. We would drive very long days, set up hopefully prior to dark, then take it down early the next morning in reverse for another long day of driving. I can still feel the cold, slippery, dew-covered snaps as we worked to get the cover back into place for the day ahead. (I counted them once but have long forgotten how many there were.) Eventually we would reach our destination and enjoy a few days of not setting up or taking down the tent trailer.
Eventually, we outgrew the tent trailer. It might have slept 6 people, but those were not 6 full-grown people — and I come from tall stock. The trailer was replaced with a 6-man tent. This was also crowded, but at least we weren’t squeezed together in a space where everything shook whenever someone rolled over. (True story: when dh wanted us to consider a tent trailer, I had him watch a video talking about how “easy” it was to set up and take down, and during that video showing the multiple steps needed, I chanted repeatedly, “In the rain.” Because we did that plenty of times with a tent and I had made up my mind to never do it again.)
As a young couple, dh and I had a small 2-man tent (it really was the size of 1.5 people) but we also did some backcountry hiking without a tent. When we had our own kids, we slept in tents when we camped. Meanwhile, dh’s parents had a motor home and his sisters purchased trailers. My comments about “plastic camping” began to ring hollow in my own ears. I met friends who had trailers and camped often. Having a toilet and a refrigerator and a bed off the ground sounded like my kind of game. And after breaking my ankle so badly and later having it fused, squatting down to unzip a tent and sleeping on the ground became nearly impossible.
Now I proudly participate in “plastic camping.” We tow a 24′ trailer with a walk-around queen bed (technically, it’s a murphy bed, but we just leave it down as a bed). We stop for lunch, walk back to the trailer, pull out the steps, and go inside to a kitchen where it is easy to prepare food. The bed is always ready for the after-lunch nap. The grandkids sleep in bunkbeds and eat breakfast at the U-shaped dinette. There is a full bathroom with room to turn around. We store our cold food in the 6 cubic foot refrigerator with a separate freezer. When we are plugged in at a campground on a hot summer day, we can run our air conditioner. As an older friend of mine says, “This doesn’t suck.”
Did you camp growing up? Do you have any stories to share? Have you read anything by Patrick McManus?
Karenaissance 
There were a couple of miserable experiences tent camping when I was a kid, but that was it.
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We rarely camped when I was growing up, but I always loved it. I took my boys when they were growing up. I’d love to go now, but I feel like in the name of safety I should have a buddy to bring along.
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I’m glad you took your boys camping. Maybe they’d be willing to go again?
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My parents camped and I enjoyed it a lot. Unfortunately, I managed to marry two men who don’t like camping or playing in the water. There were a lot of fun adventures in the camper my parents had. They later upgraded to a trailer and after they retired, they bought a beautiful Airstream. Due to their age, they recently parted ways with the Airstream.
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I am delighted to “re-find” your blog, again. I love the solution you have found to enable you to go camping. This post evokes a lot of memories for me of camping during my childhood – always in a large tent, big enough for the 5 of us. And my husband and I had some good times tent camping, early in our marriage. Camping stopped once we had our kids, but one summer, we decided to camp on our way to Boston, Mass, with our 3 kids. I was miserable – it was a huge amount of backbreaking work to set up camp and cook dinner on the camp stove. We managed to make it there and back but haven’t done any camping since. As my son, the Boy Scout, would say, camping and backpacking are satisfying mainly for the bragging rights. When I was a kid, my father would time us on how fast we could set up camp and, more difficult, strike camp and load all of the stuff on top of the car, tie down the tarp, and be on our way. Definitely bragging rights for that.
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That is “a fine and pleasant misery!” As a parent in the thick of it, I didn’t think about my own parents taking us camping (the only kind of vacation they could afford most of the time) but now that we observe young families setting up camp, I definitely see how challenging it was.
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