Camping with Little Boys

 

Our first travel trailer.

I don't remember camping much with my family as a kid. This is likely because we always had the same vacation destination: a family plot in Baldwin, MI. There was no cabin there. Instead, there were two structures: a small, silver camper and an old single-wide trailer. The silver camper is gone but the single-wide still sits there and is used by extended family members to this day. 

It wasn't until I was a teenager that my step-mom and dad bought a pop-up trailer and we started camping elsewhere in the state. My memory isn't the greatest, but I'm almost certain they got the pop-up after I started dating Ken. Eventually, my parents upgraded to a fifth wheel that my dad still pulls around to various nearby camping spots.

Ken, by contrast, didn't have a set vacation destination growing up. His family camped. They started out with a truck-bed camper, I believe, and eventually upgraded to a fifth wheel. 

Ken and I vacationed both in Baldwin and by borrowing our parents' rigs. We also did a few tenting trips early on, but we preferred to borrow the pop-up or the truck-bed camper. We did this until the boys were almost done with their daycare days. Then, after a particularly horrid trip where there was vomit and diarrhea in a non-airconditioned truck-bed camper, we decided to stop camping until we could afford to buy our own trailer. One with a bathroom and air conditioning! It took a few years but, eventually, we purchased a Wildwood with bunks for the boys. 

We used that trailer for many years. Looking back, I am so grateful my boys got to grow up this way even if they don't remember all the places we visited.