You are Not Camping if You Have to Pull it Behind You.

We have become a nation of wimps. Driving to visit Larry last Friday afternoon I - 24 was thronged with people pulling campers behind them on their way to Kentucky Lake. The campers were so big they had to have massive pick up trucks to haul them.

I don't camp because I am not too proud to admit that my idea of roughing it is going on stage in an outfit that doesn't sparkle under the stage lights but who are these people kidding?

They are not camping. They are staying in a hotel on wheels. I don't know what they pay for such equipment but it is not enough. There should be a huge surtax on the price of the camper, the truck  required to haul it and the fuel they put in it for their waste of resources.  Why should I be paying nearly four dollars for a gallon of gas in my tiny Aveo because people are guzzling up gallon after gallon to pull these monstrosities behind them or in many cases driving  a thirty foot motor coach down the highway? 

Have they learned nothing from Al Gore? Unless you are on tour hawking your newest country music cd you have no business owning one. (Besides I could never criticize Dolly)

Modern day campers are a waste of  resources. I bet every one of those people left their air conditioning running at home in an empty house so it would be comfortable when they came back from "roughing it" in their air conditioned trailers all weekend.


They didn't leave one thing back home.  They have television, internet and air conditioning in their "camper" and a cell phone in their pocket. If you still have the capacity to follow Justin Bieber's tweets while you are in the woods you are not camping!

Camping is piling tents (yes tents! remember those?) in the back of a pickup truck, staking them up and crawling inside to sleep.

It is being forced to decide between being eaten up by mosquitoes or  puttting up with the smell of Off! slathered all over your body. 

It is cooking with a mess kit over an open fire with wood you collected yourself.

It is being tricked into going on snipe hunts after midnight by the older scouts in the troop.


That's the kind of camping the boys scouts in my troop, troop 454 used to do. About once every six weeks in the summer our scout leaders would take us out to the country, (not a campground  unless we are at a Jamboree) find a spot near some godforsaken creek and set up camp. There were two guys in each pup tent and you had better hope that your tentmate didn't touch the top of the tent when it began to rain or the canvas roof would start leaking.  

I still remember a very special breakfast one of our scoutmasters cooked for us. He decided to make pancakes that morning. He didn't bother to get them cooked all the way through. They were still liquid in the center and he couldn't understand why we were eating so slowly. None had the nerve to tell him they were raw.....after all a scout is always honest.....even if it means you have to  just scarf it down and upchuck in the woods later.