[Curiosities] WHY CAMPING BECOMES FAR MORE ENJOYABLE IN ADULTHOOD

[The GodFather]

 

 

 

 

If I have an abiding memory of spending time on campsites as a child it is one thing.

Sitting in the laundrette, the rain beating down outside, watching our trainers going round and round in the washing machine, having been muddied to unrecognisable proportions by a day yomping around a sodden Lake District.

I vividly remember one of those summers, when I was probably just nine or ten, seeing a double decker bus with an advert for Malta on the side. It seemed impossibly distant and exotic, but I would go there, one day, I vowed.

I would not spend my adult summers trudging under slate-grey skies towards mountains wreathed in dank cloud, that never seemed to get any closer. I would stay in a hotel!

On those childhood holidays we had a caravan, a thing so small we christened it The Boiled Egg, because it had the appearance and rough dimensions of one.

In The Boiled Egg and its associated awning and adjacent tents, we looked like a down-at-heel circus had arrived. There was me, my mum and dad, my auntie and uncle, and my cousins.

The Boiled Egg never went anywhere exciting, not to a child. The Lake District and Wales, mainly. One time, our carnivalesque convoy travelled to the land of the Red Dragon.

 

We took several wrong turns in those far-off, pre-satnav days, and made several circuits around Mold, so many that on the first we saw a wedding party going into a church and on the last saw them emerge.

Finally we got on the right road… or, right-ish. We ended up driving so far up a mountain that we could actually see climbers below us, pointing up in amazement at The Boiled Egg going where no caravan, even one of such tiny stature, had any right to be.

We ended up at a campsite in a place called Dinas Dinlle, which sounded like something from the Lord of the Rings, which I was devouring at the time, and felt like the end of the earth.

I only mention all this because you’d expect, from these experiences, that I would eschew any form of camping at the earliest opportunity and refuse to go on any holiday that did not involve four solid walls and a roof on which the ceaseless rain did not sound like a drum solo. And, for many years, that was the case.

But somehow, over the past decade, I seem to have not only found myself camping again – and proper camping, under canvas – but doing so not with a sense of fatalism, but with an enthusiasm my younger self would be appalled at.