The Thing About Camping is...

Actually, there are a number of things about camping that I would like to mention. I just had my first ever camping experience. We spent two nights on North Stradbroke Island in our new tent.

I was very excited about the camping and my spirits weren't remotely dampened by the rain which poured down on our arrival to the island. We made our way to the campsite and it stopped raining long enough for us to pitch the tent [I've even got the lingo :-)]

Now here's one of those things about camping. It's supposed to be tough (?), ya know getting back to nature, no luxuries.... Not at all. We were surrounded by families who were camping in tent mansions. I'm not kidding, they had a living room (with telly included on powered sites), a kitchen area where the cooking went on and the sleeping area(s). I was really taken aback. But I had to laugh when you see these people packing up - it takes half the day and they need a van and sometimes a trailer too..... I like that me and Jamie arrived with all our bits on our backs!!

I need to get a bit personal at this point... to get to one of the other things about camping. You see I wake up every morning without fail at 6:30am for a pee. This is easy when you're living in a one bed apartment. You can keep your eyes closed and crawl in whatever you wear in bed (in my case, vary little) to the bathroom, sit on the loo and do what you have to do before crawling back to bed. You don't even need to wake up completely and can go back to sleep for another couple of hours. I blame these episodes on the onset of shrinking bladder syndrome which comes with old age.
Anyway, now picture the same scenario in a hostel..... totally different. You have to wake up, find clothes, put on clothes, find room key and go to bathroom, where all the bright lights definitely wake you. By the time you get back to your room you're wide awake.
The same scenario in a tent? For some strange reason the "call to nature" does not come at 6:30am but instead at 4:00am. You have to crawl out of the tent in the freezing cold to get to the loos. And Jamie has me trained to check under the toilet seat for spiders. Apparently a very dangerous kind of spider can get in to the toilets in places like campsites and hide under the seats. So this, in your mind, while holding your bladder and freezing to death, walking across a strange field with snoring tents at 4:00 in the morning is enough to rattle anyones nerves. But it's ok! If you're lucky enough you have an hour to get back to sleep before the sun rises waking the birds and therefore everyone else around them...

Would you believe, despite this I actually enjoyed camping.