Family Camping

For my family, vacation meant camping, and each summer we’d pack the car and head out somewhere new. With four kids, camping was clearly the most economical option, but I think my parents (theoretically) enjoyed it. We had two tents, a large one for the kids, and a smaller one for my parents, making setting up camp a challenge for four kids aged five to ten. Of course over the years we got better at the set up, and worse at getting along. I remember these trips like a highlight reel of summers filled with the gamut of the highs and lows of family togetherness.

What I recall was that every trip we took began with a fight. We’d spend the night before putting the roof carrier on the car, loading that and the trunk with all our camping gear and clothes so we could get an early start. We’d drag ourselves out of bed and be in the car by 6:00, or five us would. Each trip started with all of us sitting in the car, the four kids in the crowded backseat, with our pillows, games and whatever else there wasn’t room for in the trunk, waiting for my mom. The car would be running, and my dad would sit there angrily chewing his tongue (his absolute least attractive mannerism) and revving the engine as loudly as possible until my mom came out. They generally didn’t speak for at least the first day.

These trips were our annual summer vacation, and I anticipated them with both excitement and dread.  My favorite was a trip to Vermont and into Canada. Though it started with the usual drama, this trip turned out to be a lot of fun. We took day trips to Quebec where we searched in vain for beignets, and Montreal where we visited Man and His World, the site of Expo ’67 (the 1967 World’s Fair). In Quebec my braces broke, and we searched in vain for dental wax to cover the wire cutting into my cheek, the search made more interesting by my mother trying to negotiate this all in her fluent (but Parisian) French. One night we sat in a lean to at our campsite overlooking Lake Champlain watching a storm move in over the lake. The lightening and thunder were terrific and a little terrifying too, but it was wonderful and thrilling, and may be the reason I still love thunderstorms.

On these trips my father did a lot of the cooking, and so made the grocery store runs. Going to the store was an adventure in itself. I think it was the intrigue of wandering the aisles of those stores that would later create a career for me at Whole Foods Market. The store in northern Vermont was filled with all kinds of things I’d never seen before, and my dad seemed game to try them, so we returned with among other things, caramel butter which was as good as it sounds, and a pick of my father’s, pine soda. If you can imagine drinking carbonated Pine-Sol it will give you an idea of what pine soda tastes like. My father drank every drop.

I think it was on our first grocery run we saw a sign for Tibeau’s Hot Donuts and drove down a long dirt road to find Tibeau himself frying donuts in a huge kettle over an open fire. There was a long line of people waiting, and lively conversation around the fire. This was my first encounter with fresh, hot donuts, he’d scoop them out of the fryer, pop them into a brown bag, toss in cinnamon sugar and shake them. We left with a greasy bag and devoured them. They were heavenly and we were hooked. We went back every day.

The particulars of other trips blend together. There was the cold, rainy Memorial Day weekend in Provincetown, a trip through Amish country in Pennsylvania, our annual strawberry picking trips to Mattituck, among others. Even when I was in college I willingly went camping with fiends, but now when anyone suggests a camping trip, I decline. I have put in my time camping, I’ve earned a bed.