Four years ago my husband found himself in a changing job and
needing to spend 4 months in Alaska. Faced with the pressures of daily family
life alone, I could have felt overwhelmed. Instead, without hesitation, I determined that I and my 4 boys were
going to make the most of it. I packed
them all (B was 5, P was 3, and the babies were 9-months) into our van and struck
out on a spontaneous 4-month cross-country camping adventure. In that 4 months we stayed in a few hotels, we crashed on some family couches, and we spent 56 days camping. It was the best decision I’ve ever made!
Today I’d like to share three important things we
learned on our 4-month journey...
1. Mom can put up a tent.
I will be the first to admit I am usually lazy when we get to a
campsite. I’m more than willing to watch
my husband put up the tent and am very good at instructing the kids how to get everything laid out
inside of it. During our 4-month adventure without
him we camped in 10 different locations. We developed a new system with Mom staking the tent into the ground,
tightening up the rainfly guylines, patching up a hole when it rained, and
tearing down when it was time to leave.
In Idaho I stayed up all night comforting my little boys as the tent
flapped around us in strong winds, but never came crashing down upon us. On the Oregon coast, I taught them how to keep
collecting raindrops from showering down on top of them when the door was open. They learned the same about not tracking
Nevada sand in and out and keeping Illinois mosquitoes at bay. The tent became a safe haven, our home, built
by Mom and standing strong.
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| Hanging out warm and dry in our summer home |
2. Mom cannot start a fire.
The second thing we learned is much more humbling. I am not good at building a fire. It’s really only by luck that we ever got a
single twig to light. We gathered kindling,
branches, and logs. We tried A-frames,
and teepees, and just throwing everything in all together. We stuffed the fire ring with newspapers,
with dry leaves, with an entire roll of paper towels. Barely even a spark. Our first attempt at lighting moist Pacific
Northwest logs ended with a lot of smoke and nothing else and it was hours
before we eventually settled for a lukewarm can of soup and lightly tanned marshmallows.
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| "Tanning" marshmallows on Mom's s smoking log pile |
After that I got
creative...or cheated...and bought a propane stove. We never gave up on building a fire-every
dinner we ate in the Redwoods was cooked that way-but I avoided endless nights
of hungry moaning and frustration by swallowing my pride and preparing most our
meals on a cooking surface I knew I could rely on.
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| Proof I did get a fire started once in awhile |
3. Mom loves to travel and be outdoors and can
teach me to love that, too.
I am a vagabond stuck in a suburban housewife's body. My remedy for stress or a bad mood day is to
hop in the car and go somewhere...anywhere. I didn’t think twice about being “homeless” for a summer. It got me away from the monotony of housework
and appointment keeping. There were days
when it was really hard and I begged my husband to come back home. Yet, they were outweighed by the days I just
felt happy.
Happy to be living my dream; to be traveling and free. Happy to have nothing else to do but hunt for
seashells, or hike in the forest, or stare at jellyfish in the aquarium, or
count Midwest water towers as we drove for hours. With a baby strapped on my back (and
sometimes another one on my front) we climbed lighthouses and scaled rock
piles. We happened upon small town
festivals and larger county fairs. I sat
back and learned to explore the world like a little boy. I listened to them. I talked with them. I hugged them and they laughed with me.
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| Climbing an Oregon lighthouse |
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| Fun on the Oregon Coast |
Somewhere along the way, B learned its okay
to ask a million questions about the world around him. P's 3 yr-old soul
screamed out that his home is in nature. And, much to everyone’s utter unbelief, the
babies survived. When the end of summer
finally came, when my husband was back
with us, and we moved back into a traditional home, I looked around me and that is when I finally felt overwhelmed... with love
for my adventurous camping family.
What lessons have your kids learned while camping?
Want to read more about our epic summer adventure?
Check out the run-in we had with squirrels
and
a cool hotel we stayed in.
More of the tales will be on there way...