Flat screen camping?

The article jumped out at me from the pages of a Fort Wayne newspaper.
It seems there had been a series of burglaries targeting northeast Indiana campgrounds that had closed for the winter.
That, in itself, was unsurprising.
It was the list of stolen items that caught my eye.
Flat-screen TVs were at the top of the list.
Camping? With a flat-screen TV?
I shook my head, feeling — as usual — older and a little bit out of it.
At the risk of sounding like a dinosaur, I have to say that camping today doesn’t exactly resemble what it was like when I was a kid.
My first campouts were in the back yard with my older brother in a canvas pup tent that smelled bad and had a tendency to leak when it got wet.
Things were marginally better a few years later when the family embraced camping. We had air mattresses that stayed pretty well inflated all night long. The tents didn’t leak, and my mother could whip up a respectable family dinner on the Coleman stove.
That was the set-up for some ambitious family vacations, camping in Canada, across the Plains to Colorado, and more in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
And camping hadn’t really changed much when I was in college and headed out for three months of solo hitchhiking and tent-camping in Europe. My equipment included a pup tent, a sleeping bag, and a one-burner stove.
When Connie and I started camping with our own kids, we inherited an old Sears “Edmund Hillary model” tent from her family and used it on treks up the Maine coast.
We later bought a large, family-sized tent that I fell in love with.
And about that time, things began to change.
There had always been a distinction between tent campers and trailer campers. But by the 1980s, the gap was widening. Motorhomes as big as Greyhound buses were far more common than tents.
At least that was the case in the state parks and campgrounds we frequented. The diehard tent-camping crowd apparently had retreated into the wilderness, opting for conditions far more rugged than we wanted to deal with.
There were a few exceptions, of course. Our favorite campground will always be Hermit Island, a spot right on the Atlantic coast not far from Bath, Maine. Its terrain is difficult enough that most motorhomes can’t handle it. As a result, it remains just a little more primitive and much more appealing to those camping primarily with tents.
But as our kids grew up, it became increasingly clear that we were in the minority when it came to our camping philosophy.
Portable TV sets began to appear. Air conditioning units in motorhomes could be heard humming in the night.
At one campground in upper New York State, I remember feeling a bit like a carnival attraction as I set up the tent for the night. There wasn’t another to be seen around us. People stared.
These days, they probably wouldn’t even notice.
They’d be inside their motorhomes and trailers, watching their flat-screen TVs.[[In-content Ad]]