I would rather not

Growing up my parents liked to camp. We never had a tent or a tent trailer. We started off with something very similar to what is pictured below. Except picture a late 1970’s Ford F250 and the camper of the same vintage and same style. I recall it was called a Handi Kamp (Camp?) at the time.

There was my mother and father, myself, and my younger sister. This was before I was in my teens. We all slept in that thing. There was no stove but there was a small sink at the back. There was no furnace in it either. We lived in northern British Columbia at the time. We were so far north that there was not much in the way of civilization between us and the Yukon border.

My father was five foot ten. There was just enough room for him to stretch out to sleep with his feet almost touching the door. Dad moved around a lot in his sleep. Invariably he would somehow end up with his pillow and head in the sink and usually managed to unlock the doorknob with his feet. We would wake up freezing due to the door being wide open.

Early summer mornings in northern British Columbia are not warm. They are chilly. The parents usually had my sister and me get dressed and booted us outside. We were handed water and toothbrushes and told to brush out teeth. Their habit was to take their time leisurely getting dressed. I think they took some kind of perverse joy in us kids being cold outside.

Dad always cooked breakfast. He had a grate that went over the campfire where he put a skillet on top of it. He would fry up a bunch of bacon on a roaring fire, dump the grease on the fire, then cook the eggs. Coffee was in a steel coffee pot and we had steel coffee cups. Toast was also done over the fire. It warmed you up quick. Trying not to burn yourself on a steel coffee cup while trying to drink coffee was another matter. I do not know why my parents kept using steel cups.

There really was not enough room in the Handi Kamp so we graduated to a typical truck camper, then to a holiday trailer. Years later my parents bought a small fifth wheel trailer. At that time they were living in Sparwood, British Columbia and would park their fifth wheel trailer at Rexford, Montana for the summer. They loved Montana as do I. That was well over thirty years ago.

These days I love to get out in the country but at then end of the day I would rather stay in a motel or hotel. I can put up with a lot of things but I hate being cold. I like someplace where I can get a decent night's sleep and a hot shower. I froze enough camping in my youth.