camping

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Camping My Style

December 5 of 31 December-ish posts

I’m no stranger to crazy sleeping conditions when away from home. I’ve travelled far and wide and slept in a thousand different beds, from plush king-size mattresses to wooden bunks in unheated cabins to sleeping bags on the ground with a snow-covered tent just inches from my face.

But somehow 2022 was something of a hotel year.

What do you wish you’d done
less of this past year?

Multiple trips to the mountains and at least a few weeks abroad in 2022 and, if I’m being completely honest, I only spent a single night in a tent.

I mean, sure, they frown on you pitching your own accommodations on the lawns around Disney World, and while I probably could have gotten away with it in New York’s Central Park, I was travelling light and a sleeping bag would have cluttered my carry on.

I joke, but seriously though, I get to the end of 2022 looking back on my travels and outdoor adventures and by random happenstance they all kind of started and ended in reasonably nice hotels. 

We stayed in a pirate themed room in Florida.

My various trips to the mountains included a ski lodge condo, an Airbnb basement suite, renting an entire house with my running friends, and an apartment suite near to the highland games grounds where my daughter was competing that particular weekend.

We booked an anniversary getaway to a nordic spa and I wasn’t going to convince my wife that tenting was a great accompaniment to that adventure.

And in New York last month we were on the 33rd floor of a mid-town hotel overlooking the Hudson river with glimpses of Times Square.

Hotels abounded.

And while we were spoiled for every last one of those trips, I’ve been looking back over two-aught-twenty-two and kinda wish I’d had a few less of those kinds of adventures, and few more in one of our tents.

We have three tents.

Our oldest by far is an early-2000s model backpacking tent. It’s reasonably light, sleeps two, and served us well on numerous hiking trips.

The big tent is our car camping tent, a hefty six person beast that has a full vestibule (into which I could fit either of my other two tents assembled) and it’s what we bought so we could camp as a family with a dog in her kennel everyone on an inflatable bed and yet still keep all the luggage organised.

The newest tent is the three person ultra-compact tent that we bought as a replacement for our first ageing backpacking tent. It’s so lightweight  it practically carries itself up the mountain, and we’ve set it up only four times in as many years, mostly thanks to those particular hiking trails being closed due to the pandemic.

It’s a good thing I cleaned and packed them all so well in 2021 because they didn’t really see much action this year.

Now, I don’t purport this blog to be a camping blog, per se, but there is a certain expectation from even just me that the term “outdoor adventure” comes with a certain frequency of sleeping outdoors. I subscribe to enough other content creators to know that some of those folks are sleeping outdoors on the weekly, and even the local guys I watch truck it out to the coast for the harshest part of winter to keep up their stats.

I checked into hotels a lot this year. And I kinda dropped the ball on the tenting. And I’m actually a little bit sad about that.

Posted on episode 189

Casting Call

Our recent camping trip north of the city opened the door for a few good opportunities to toss a line into the lake. I brought along my new fishing rod, rigged it up for the ready, and leaned it against an out of the way tree in case the mood or moment struck.

The shadow silhouette of a fisherman.

Our campsite was a sixty-second walk to the shoreline, and on a good choice of visit I often found empty a small wooden dock protruded five meters out into the murky lake water.

On a less-good choice of visit I found the dock occupied and myself instead needing to trudge through the spongy layer of grasses and mosses growing from the loamy sand to find a spot clear enough to edge up to the waterside to be able to cast out without tangling my line in the vegetation.

Conversation Starter

It also turns out that a fishing rod is something of a lakeside invitation to chat.

Strolling to the shore, invariably someone would comment on the potential for a catch. “How’s it looking?” someone would call out. “It might be a little hot for them out there right now.” Someone else would add, noting the 30C heat still lingering from the day.

And “Any luck?” not just someone but everyone would ask as I strolled back to camp empty-handed after an hour of tossing my lure into the water.

As it turns out the most inviting pose a guy can take (by far) when visiting the lake is to sit by oneself at the end of a narrow dock, dangling one’s feet over the end, holding a fishing rod with a line threading outward into the water. This must project some magnetic signal to other campers inviting them to wander up, sit down and chat.

I found myself playing host to all manner of random characters telling me their tales as I sat holding court with my fishing rod patiently dangling outwards.

Catchless?

At the end maybe the weather was too hot or I was too impatient or perhaps my small collection of lures was not in agreement with the fish swimming through the murky lake water that weekend.

I didn’t catch so much more than a few clumps of weedy grass.

I did however catch a moment of peace, and a few curious stories.

Posted on episode 183

A Reprieve by Rain

It was raining this morning when I woke up, the light, almost inaudible patter of drops hitting the windows and roof, creeping into my zone of awareness as I lay in bed contemplating starting my day.

The rain is oh-so welcome this morning, in the wake of a week-long heat wave that baked the city streets and melted our souls, reminding us yet again that we’re too cheap (or just too environmentally guilt-ridden) to install air conditioning.

To be fair, the heat mostly broke over the weekend and the air has cooled considerably since the unbearable never-ending outdoor-oven-like temperatures late into last week. But the rain dropped the temperature even more into the mid-teens and it was the first time in recent memory that I felt a bit of a shiver and chill when I opened the door to let the dog outside.

More important than my personal comfort, of course, is that the rain brings an area-wide break in the risk of fire. The provincial map on the Alberta Fire Bans website had turned from yellow caution to orange restriction and had begun changing to splotches of angry red prohibition against burning, lest the very real risk of forest fire turn into literal flames.

Each year it seems that entire communities burn to the ground because the rain is a few days late in arriving to quench the tinder-like deadfall.

Never mind that in a few days I am about to go camping and as we plan our oh-so-important campfire menu we were seriously wondering if our trip would be a campstove adventure rather than an open flame cast iron cooking frenzy. That would have been a personal disappointment.

Almost always the rain means cool, wet and fresh but this week it also means campfires and cast iron.

And it is raining this morning.

Posted on episode 180

Local Big

In merely one week I’m going to be packing up that little black truck in the background of this photo and driving north with a cargo of camping gear to spend some quality time in the Alberta wilderness.

(No) thanks to the pandemic it’s been two years since I’ve slept in a tent, and coincidentally that same tent will be pitched on about the same weekend in the same vicinity as when this photo was taken… two years ago.

for whatever one photo is worth:

It’s something of a running joke, or insider gag, that every local road trip through the rural country highways usually involves stopping for at least one photo with something big.

No… BIG.

An oversized bird statue. An obscenely large perogy on a fork. A life-sized UFO landing pad. Or the world-famous giant Easter egg, a Ukrainian pysanka, in Vegreville.

Or, for this example, a few kilometers drive from where we had been camping in the bush, we escaped the rain for a couple hours to meander into Vilna, Alberta for some ice cream and (of course) to pose with the World’s Largest Mushrooms.

Like so many World’s Largest objects scattered around Western Canada, the World’s Largest Mushrooms are a photogenic bit of roadside art propped up in a small park, tucked into a tiny neighbourhood, hidden behind the main street of a pinprick town in the middle of the Alberta prairie.

This is as much a kind of local hubris as anything else. For many of these small little towns, despite their small town beauty and unique identity in vast western expanse, the there is little reason besides a fill of the gas tank or a happenstance need for a meal to veer off the highway into their streets. They are lovely little places, but apart from a green highway sign marking their location as one speeds by at a hundred kilometers per hour, few people turn turn gaze from the road… unless as there occasionally may be, there is a World’s Largest… something… anything to be seen.

With some steel and paint and artistic license, any small town in the middle of nowhere becomes a tourist destination.

An excuse to visit. A reason to stop. A purpose for a day-long country-side road trip with a camera and a sense of local curiosity.

And of course, there is usually some ice cream close by, too.