Day 4: An Accomplishment of Yours

Depoe Bay, OR

An accomplishment I'm grateful for is learning to camp with the kids.  I went camping a few times growing up, and several times as a young adult, but I was always a tag along.  I never had to reserve the site, set up the tent, plan the food, start the fire, or figure out what to do about bears and bathrooms and bad weather.  Let alone, do all these things with kids.  For the first ten years with kids, this seemed like too high of a bar to clear, and I never attempted it.  But - I love being in nature, and camping is a huge part of summer life in northern Nevada (where we are fortunate to have the Sierra Nevadas next door, cool nights / mornings, and barely any bugs).  Also, there are amazing memories to be made with sunset lake swims and bonfire S'mores and flashlight tag and ghost stories in tents.  So two years ago, we acquired the supplies and gave camping a go.  

Our first attempt was a fail - it was a wind advisory day, which is challenging for the most seasoned tent campers.  After setting up the tent and then watching it blow over like a tumbleweed, I called it - we ended up packing up and heading home before we even got to S'mores.  It was tempting at that point to throw in the towel and just say that camping is not for us, we are more of a day outing family.  But we got a second attempt that summer, with a lot of help from my brother Eric, and in a location that was impossible to turn down - in an isolated cove next to the ocean, complete with tide pools and star fish and seals and sea lions, along the Oregon coast - and that attempt was a success.  It felt great to wake up so close to the ocean, and it felt even better to overcome a failure.  Last summer, we camped a couple times with friends, with exactly the forever memories I hoped for.  And this week, we're getting ready to camp again.  I'm still fairly scared of  lighting the camp stove, and of running into bears in the night, and about keeping meat cool enough to be safe to eat - but with each successful camp, it gets more fun and less scary.  I'm grateful that we now get to call ourselves campers!