I had planned on writing this post a few days ago, while we were on our annual camping trip with my bestie in the desert, but I ended up running out of juice from my phone and the internet connection was bad, so it had to wait a little bit.
But don’t worry, it’s like we’re still on our camping trip because I still haven’t unpacked the car yet from our trip from 3 days ago (other than perishables), but doing it today. I’ve just been too exhausted. (Theme of my life lately.)
This camping trip is actually my second camping trip of the summer, and my daughters’ third camping trip. My sons decided not to join us because one son is going camping with his friends next week and the other son had already taken off two days to go camping and didn’t want to miss work for a third camping trip.
Yes, last week my mom took all my kids camping. It was a nice trip for them even though it was in the middle of a record breaking heat wave. But at the very end, my daughter twisted her foot on a rock, got her foot caught in her shoe, and broke her foot. It isn’t a terrible break; it is a greenstick fracture that should heal quickly, but its a break nonetheless.
This fracture almost got our camping trip canceled entirely. We didn’t want to cancel it because it is a tradition going back five years already, with my best friend and her kids, and it’s a real bonding experience. But with my sons opting out of coming and my daughter with a broken foot…
My best friend convinced my daughter to come anyhow. Even if it meant she couldn’t climb the mountains in the desert around our campsite that she looks forward to every year. We brought camping chairs and told her that she can sit and use her tablet, the same as she would at home, if she wanted to, and so we basically convinced her.
Other than one thing.
She took a shower and despite wrapping it (not a good enough job) her cast got wet and it didn’t dry, so it ended up coming off and she was using an ace bandage instead. She said that she wouldn’t come camping unless we got a cast back on, so we went off to urgent care and waited hours for them to put on a new cast, before we went off on our camping trip. This meant that we only arrived at the place once it was good and dark, so I don’t have pictures from at night.
We made a fire with charcoal to cook up hot dogs and kebabs, zucchini and potatoes, as well as marshmallows.
We then made a bonfire with wooden logs, enjoyed some alcoholic cider for the adults and fake beer for the children, and enjoyed each other’s company, looking at the stars, the main reason for our trip to the desert.
It is gorgeous over there; with no light polution you can see everything, including the Milky Way, and the reason for our camping then is that it is during the Perseids meteor shower. Unfortunately, the kids were camping with my mom during the peak so we were unable to go to the desert then, and since we weren’t at the peak, we didn’t see any shooting stars, but that’s ok.
It was already late by the time we put up our tents, made harder by the fact that two of the tents were broken, even though they were brand new. I bought tents on sale from a cheap website and learned my lesson. We got splinters from the plastic of the poles… And one tent, once we put it together, ended up being small, and my kid refused to sleep in it. So we put together three tents, two were used, and I slept outside under the stars.
I decided that for next year, I will be investing in better tents. There’s no point in getting cheaper tents if they break. I’ll buy ones that are known to be good ones, and most likely pop up tents, since those are my few ones that didn’t break, and it’s much easier for me to put them together.
In the morning, I used my camp stove to heat up some water for us to have coffee. I ended up really needing that since I only slept 3 hours- it was too nice to want to sleep, and then someone woke me up early in the morning…
Usually it is so sunny and hot there in the morning that we need to pack up right away to get out of the sun, but that morning it was cloudy, so we could have a chilled out morning before we needed to pack up and head out.
There’s a few things I’ve learned over the years about camping with my disabled body, especially after I dislocated my pelvis badly one year while camping.
We don’t rough it. We don’t go glamping, with fancy tents and real beds and air conditioning, but our camping isn’t as basic as possible. Though there are rocks to sit on, we have enough camping chairs that everyone can have one comfortably, especially myself. After a 2.5 hour drive to reach the desert, and cooking the food, I need a nice comfortable armchair to relax on, so we take up a lot of room in our car with a nice amount of chairs. (I brought a few too many this time, though, since I didn’t realize that my bestie also had chairs.)
When we went camping on the beach years ago as a family, we slept in sleeping bags on foam pads, but once we had a car we invested in air mattresses, which makes camping that much more comfortable.
However, because of my back, an air mattress isn’t good enough for me, since it indents whereever you’re heaviest, which means that my back isn’t fully straight, which I need at the end of a long day for my back to “reset” for the next morning.
I bought myself a camping cot, and it doesn’t take up a huge amount of room- it folds up nearly as small as the camping chairs, and it allows me to sleep more or less comfortably. (I have to sleep on my back instead of my side, which means I snore, but it’s ok overall.)
Another thing I bought because of my disabled body is this camping toilet. There are no bathrooms or facilities of any kid in the desert camping site, so you just find a private area and squat to relieve yourself. Only when I last tried to do that, I dislocated my hips, which was terrible. (They fortunately got jerked back into place when I unfortunately got into a car accident on the way home.) Since then, I bring along this camping toilet, which folds up small as well, and carry it to a private area when I need to use it.
The one bigger challenge this year from previous years camping is that I have a new car with a smaller trunk. Part of my thinking when buying this car was that when we camp, my son Lee would be using his car to take along some of the items… but Lee and Ike didn’t come along on this trip, which meant I needed to figure out how to put everything in my car.
Since it was just three of us and the dog in the car, I was able to lower one of the back seats, and use that area to carry things that wouldn’t fit in the trunk with everyone else. To stop the tents and such from falling on my daughter sitting in the back, I tied the items together with rope, which helped somewhat.
And now… I think it is finally time to empty out the car from all the camping equipment, and put it away for next year.
Do you go camping? How often? What do you bring with you when you camp? Do you camp alone or with friends?
