fun in the pop-up outdoors

we are alive and well after our first foray into camping with a wee person!

we are somewhat lazy campers at the best of times, jamie and i.  we are the folks who like to eat hot dogs every single freaking night on a camping trip.  we eat with our hands and use - gasp - paper plates for the most part. any kind of weirdo packaged food, preferably somewhat healthy, that i can use to feed us while making our lives easier is par for the course.  we never wash dishes but we do spend an inordinate amount of time ensuring our fire is more than adequate.  we aren't the folks you see with the washed laundry, margarita blender or the delicious menu of time-consuming meals.

in past years we borrowed our camping gear from jamie's parents.  they are well-stocked and have always made sure that we took all the things that we needed... but earlier this month jamie suggested it was high time to buy our own camping gear.  i guess once you're each as old as two new drivers you should fend for yourselves in the great outdoors!  ;-)

sights set on "camping - easy" i carted cole off to canadian tire the day before our trip.  i did mention we are a tad lazy, right?  also - very good procrastinators.  we did the quick shop and picked up a tent, sleeping bags, air mattress, lantern and chairs.  i think that was it.  we got the perfect tent for the lazy - but only as long as you're not also inept.  a pop-up tent - no fuss, no muss, no fiddling.  as i was lined up to pay (looking like the least prepared person who intended to go camping ever - a baby and all-you-need-for-camping at once?  hello!) and a canadian tire (ugh) person came over to tell me, "you know you can't return tents, right?"  what does that mean?  apparently he had just had some woman try to return the same tent because it was impossible to get back into the carrying case.  i looked over and saw that it was all jammed, half-popped up and taped into the carrying bag.  well, since we had already used all of cole's generous shopping good-will deciding which of the million identical sleeping bags were the ones for us i decided to just stick with the pop-up tent.  good choice - very easy!

anyway, gear aside.  we filled the trunk with hot dogs and marshmallows (and some healthy food for cole and ourselves too, we've matured!) and were off on sunday morning.  we went to porteau cove, between horseshoe bay and squamish.  it's a terrific campground, right on the georgia straight.

we dilly dallied around until it was check-in time, playing on the rocks at low tide, looking for crabs, eating a picnic and exploring a bit.  it was a bit gray looking - a bit too gray for two grown-ups who brought only summer clothes for themselves.  cole had an ample selection but i had a thin hoodie, jamie had one with a broken zipper and we both only had flip-flops and shorts!  thankfully it started to get sunny by noon.

once we got our spot we started to set-up.  happily, the pop-up tent is just that.  about, oh, seven seconds worth of effort.  fantastic!  the air mattress plugged into the car and in another forty seconds we had that sorted.  it was cole's naptime, so he and i went into the tent while jamie drove off to buy an ax for chopping up the firewood.  apparently, being condo-dwellers, we do not own the type of things that we will need if there's ever some kind of crazy apocalypse-type situation.  ;-)  he refused to ask to borrow someone else's ax because he is convinced that "an ax is a personal thing - you don't borrow some guy's ax."  anyway, cole and i crept into the tent to nap.

it was hotter than the devil's pants in there.  the beating-down sun made that place hotter than a sauna but cole managed to doze for a while.  i mostly fanned us and tried to read.  after naptime we played on the beach - our campsite was right on the water and it was a lovely place to be.

soon enough it was time for the big feast - hotdogs on a stick!  let's cook them all!!!  afterwards we roasted marshmallows, something cole had been looking forward to.  whenever we told him we were going camping he'd say "and roasting marshmallows?" hopefully.  of course, the tricky part was bedtime.  

he didn't want any of it.  he just ramped around like a maniac (hmm, marshmallows, is that you?) and wanted out of the tent.  eventually - something we never do at home - we gave in and brought him out to sit with us.  it was getting towards sunset and we snuggled in the chair for a long time, until it got dark out and he actually was tired enough to ask to go to the tent for sleeping.

the night was...  hmm...  the night was all the joys of sleeping on an air mattress and sleeping with a space-hogging toddler rolled together!  cole slept really well actually, but jamie and i were up all the time.  porteau cove is located right below the train tracks and it's nigh on impossible to sleep at 4 am when a train comes barrelling down on top of you.  also, i kept dreaming about being harassed by bears - not super relaxing.  and then there was some kind of gusty windstorm that whipped our tent roof around like we were in a farmhouse in kansas!  it was actually really cool though, the crazy wind - i do love wild weather.

all in all it was a great trip.  when we rolled off our somewhat deflated air mattress at the ripe old hour of six am the winds had barely died down.  we packed up the campsite quickly and opted to have breakfast on the ride home.  thankfully, we were able to get the pop-up tent back down even in the gale.  it confirms my suspicion that the tent-returning woman was just incompetent!  it took about five minutes and we were back home for showers by time time we'd normally be having breakfast anyway!

now, we can't wait to go camping again.  bring on the hotdogs!