Camping return comes in August

Why did we camp as a family when I was a kid?

Simple: Because it was cheaper.

OK, maybe my dad would have preferred the words “more affordable.”

During the Depression, Dad had done a stint as a traveling salesman hawking the goods of Lever Brothers soap company door to door.

That left some impressions.

One involved making sure you left the bathroom lavatory perfectly clean for the next guy, something you learn when traveling by train across the Midwest with dozens of other traveling salesmen sharing a single washroom.

Another involved checking out your accommodations before you booked a room.

On those occasions when the family stopped at a motel for the night, the routine was always the same.

Dad would stop at the office, inquire about the price, then personally inspect the room.

If it met his standards, he’d come back to the car and say, “Well, girls, it looks like we’re in like Flynn.”

That expression grew from some Hollywood scandal involving the actor Errol Flynn, and it was completely inappropriate.

But there you go.

After a family excursion through southern Indiana about 1956, Dad came to a firm conclusion: Motels were too doggoned expensive when you were traveling with a family of six.

A solution had to be found. And the solution was camping.

Trouble is, if you want to go camping you need tents.

We had no tents.

And in 1956 or 1957 that wasn’t an easy proposition.

I remember a trip to an army surplus store in Huntington at the time; it smelled about as bad as you can imagine. Old tents, old canvas, old canteens 10 years past their use-by date.

Eventually, we got our gear together and we camped — with serious success and great memories — from Quebec to Colorado, from the Upper Peninsula to the Outer Banks.

By doing that, we were in the minority.

So was Connie’s family. They were camping as well, for many of the same reasons.

It made sense then that when the two of us got together we camped.

And by that, I mean we really camped. No trailers. No RVs. No cabins in state parks.

Real camping. Tents. Air mattresses. Hard ground. Hikes to the restrooms in the middle of the night. State park showers that required a regular insertion of quarters to make the water flow. Campgrounds in Maine that relied upon solar heat to provide anything close to a hot shower.

Our first tent, as a couple, was a pup tent with a wooden pole at the front and back.

I’d used it for months while hitch-hiking around Europe.

It was followed by a Sears tent that Connie’s family had used and tucked into a closet.

For a couple of years, we rented a tent from an outfitter called Eastern Mountain Sports to use on weekend outings. (That was fine until I was almost swept out into the North Atlantic when the tent turned into a giant windsail. Fortunately, both I and the deposit survived.)

A real tent purchase followed, a Moss Arcadia bought as a second from the factory outlet in Camden, Maine.

It was marvelous.

But as time passed and kids grew and our knees and backs grew older, camping began to lose some of its appeal.

Unlike my father, I am not inclined to check out the rooms at a motel with a vacancy. I’ll just book the room and trust the proprietor or the name brand on the sign out front.

That is, until now.

While sorting out plans for the summer, my wife had an idea.

Three of our grandchildren live in Massachusetts, and we never get to see them as much as we would like.

Wouldn’t it be great, she wondered, if we could take the grandkids camping for a couple of nights?

And sure enough, she found a way to do that.

It will happen in August if all goes well.

Grandfather and grandmother with an almost 10-year-old grandson, a just-turned 8-year-old granddaughter, and a grandson who will turn 7 on Christmas Eve will all go tent camping for two nights on the Maine coast.

What could possibly go wrong?