Let’s Go Camping!
One day, out of the blue, my husband said to me “Let’s go camping”. Hmmm, I thought, who is this person who thinks I might like camping? Well, to be fair, we’d only been married a couple of months (and we only knew each other for 3 weeks before we eloped) so I guess it was reasonable that he didn’t know that I had never been camping in my life. Now, when I think back to that time, I wonder how someone could live to be 35 years old without never having experienced the joy of camping! How dull my life had been before I met this wonderful man. We had no camping equipment of any kind so we went out and bought a tent, we borrowed a cooler and an air mattress, someone gave us second-hand sleeping bags, and we shoved all of that into our little Honda Civic and off we went on our first adventure together. My life has never been the same since! Here we are, twenty-four years later, and I can’t imagine going a whole month without going camping, even if only for overnight. Now we have so much camping equipment that we had to buy a truck to hold it all. My husband and I have become avid wilderness campers and have explored a large part of our beautiful province of British Columbia. We have encountered many wild animals including black bears, cougars, coyotes and porcupines but our scariest experience was with a big, old angry bull. We hadn’t realized the night before that we were pitching our tent in the middle of his summer grazing meadow! Whew, that was the fastest packing up we ever did! We’ve been lucky enough to have had the pleasure of camping in many different areas. I can’t decide which I like the best; camping beside a serene mountain lake, a magnificent waterfall, a peacefully meandering creek or even enjoying a dry camp in a picturesque alpine meadow. It’s all heaven to me. Waking up at dawn, unzipping the tent and breathing in the magnificent scents and scenes of nature – life doesn’t get any better than that. I’m so glad that those many years ago my husband said to me “Let’s go camping”.
