The last time my husband and I went ‘tent camping’ I was six months pregnant. It was an annual camping excursion with friends and our only time out with the tent that year. We packed our Mazda Protege with camping equipment, food, and the supply of pillows I had started using to sleep comfortably. The car was stuffed to the gills and I turned to my husband with a realization, “next year we’re going to have to fit a baby in there somewhere”.
Our trusty tent had done well for us. It was the only one we’d ever owned and it had helped us travel on-the-cheap throughout much of Eastern Canada, the US and parts of Europe. On this occasion, though, we unfolded it to realize it was still wet from being packed up in the rain the year before. Smelling, moldy and ripped, we knew our old Zellers tent was on its last legs, but we got it set up and made due one last time.
Ready to relax, my husband set his camp chair by the fire, but it was old and the canvas gave out as soon as he sat in it. Great!
At the end of a long first day we went to bed. In the middle of the night I awoke amid a familiar air mattress hiss as my butt sank to the ground. I used the extra pillows I had brought as a make-shift mattress and struggled through the rest of the night.
By the end of the weekend we’d had enough…all done. We took our ponging tent, our useless chair and our deflated air mattress and chucked them all in the dumpster on the way out of the campground. It was the end of an era.
So with a baby on the way, no tent, and a realization that we were never really ‘hard core’ anyway it became clear that it was time to shift gears. It was time for an upgrade, if you will. We started investigating pop-up camper trailers and realized that, with a little planning, we could make it happen. That was an exciting prospect! An exciting prospect that was nearly three years in the making.
We purchased our new camper this winter and will pick it up next month. Our son is now two years old and we are psyched to set out on a whirl-wind of family fun and adventure. I’ll keep you posted.
Tags: Camping, Cottage On Wheels, family, RV, trailer, travel
