Several months ago, my sister and her dear friend Kristina took their families on a camping trip. Around the same time, Mikhail and I decided to take our kids on their first trip to Yosemite as a Rosh Hashanah celebration.
I believe that is where the similarities between our two camping trips end.
We have taken our kids camping numerous times before, starting when Elan was only eight months old, but always with a large group of Mikhail’s family members or on one-night trips with other families with young children.
Elan’s first camping trip, August 2007, Swimmer’s Delight, CA
We had never gone camping just the four of us. In fact, on these group camping trips, I had always gratefully relished all the things we didn’t need to bring: a car-camping stove, food for most of our meals, firewood. When we were still in the days of the little 2-person backpacking tent, Mikhail’s generous family even outfitted us with a larger tent.
Elan taking a break from the great outdoors with Grandma Karen
Now that is the way to camp with little kids!
But as the extended family camping trip morphed into a family-house-rental-getaway, Mikhail and I decided it was time for us to start a new tradition of camping with our kids.
I have great memories of camping in the Southwest with my family when I was a kid, up to the point in time when my mom decided that washing dishes in cold water didn’t feel like a vacation to her. After that I have great memories of long car trips and hotels with pools.
In life B.C. (Before Children), Mikhail and I did our share of car camping and a whole lot of backpacking, especially in South America. We even did a 3-day backpacking trip with great friends on our honeymoon.
A picture Mike sent me he called “the honeymoon suite” –
Backpacking with Mike & Maud, Sequoia National Park, July 2003
Back to the current reality.
A week before we were to leave for our Yosemite camping trip, Elan got sick. Then I got sick. I spent the Sunday before the trip mostly in bed, modifying our old backpacking packing list to a car-camping-with-kids list, trying not to feel overwhelmed by the number of to-do items stacking up in my head.
I had just read this post on Scary Mommy and the bit about Pinterest was fresh in my mind: “We as a community of mothers may disagree about a lot but our #1 source of intermother angst can be sourced back to Pinterest.”
I haven’t spent much time on Pinterest – I used it to gather ideas for our house remodel but don’t hang out there regularly – but I can relate. It’s that New Modern Dilemma of constantly seeing what “looks like” perfection and comparing our own un-perfect reality to it.
“If we manage to get there,” I told Mikhail, “it will be the un-Pinterest camping trip.”
And so it was.
On Wednesday, we switched to Plan B and decided to send Elan to school and leave after we picked him up.
On Thursday, we switched to Plan C and booked a motel room two-thirds of the way to Yosemite for that first night. (Which turned out to be a great decision.)
We pulled sleeping bags and pads out of the kind of storage you need a stepladder and a stick to access. We dragged a cracked orange plastic bin labeled Camping Supplies out from the storage under our stairs. We pillaged the earthquake supply bin.
And then, about two hours after Plan C’s designated leaving time, Mikhail looked at me and said, “Where do you think the tent might be?” He wasn’t talking about our tiny, mouse-chewn backpacking tent. He was talking about the big, cheap tent we bought at Walmart several years ago.
I felt my brow furrow. “It’s not under the stairs?”
“No.”
“It’s not in the earthquake supplies?”
“No.”
And then a memory made its way through the fog of motherhood to me, traversing over a year. “I’m having a vague recollection of the last time we camped. It was at your mom’s house, in the backyard. The tent got wet from the dew, and – oh, no, am I remembering this right? – we might have left it there to dry?”
I called Karen. She confirmed – the tent was at her house. Three hours away. In the wrong direction.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“You should not be sorry!” I said. “We were the ones who completely forgot about it.” In fact, I distinctly remembered myself saying something like, “Don’t bother rushing it back to us. Who knows the next time we’ll need it. It won’t be for a while, and it takes up a lot of space to store it.”
Luckily, we live in Berkeley, which is full of outdoors-loving families, so it only took a few minutes of working the text messaging before I found a tent to borrow, conveniently located directly across the street at the house of my neighbor who had taken my kids off my hands while we packed. (Jeannine, you’re a life-saver!)
As it got later and later, we switched to Plan C-2 and decided to eat dinner at the Chipotle next to REI, with Mikhail running into REI to buy propane for our borrowed stove, which came along with our borrowed camp chairs (Thanks, Sara & Renee!).
By this time, we could barely squeeze the trunk shut. Safe to say that my assertion this summer that we could never do an extended car camping road trip with two kids in our 2001 Camry was shown to be true. We could hardly fit the bare-minimum in for what was now a two-night trip. And since I didn’t have a chance to buy rain boots to fit Emry, I decided to leave everyone’s rain boots at home.
After all, despite the rain we woke up to in the Bay Area on Friday, according to the Yosemite weather forecast, the chance of rain was only 20% there. California’s in a three-year drought. It never rains in September.
Ha. Hahahahaha.
Fast forward to Crane Flat Campground, Yosemite.
We had a great time.
Emry and the giant sequoia, Tuolumne Grove, Yosemite, September 2014
Sure, the kids fussed and whined at times. Sure, both Mikhail and I had our snappy moments, especially when we were hungry or I was feeling the leftovers of my cold. But overall, it was great.
We did two hikes with the kids, each in the three-mile range, and each with substantial elevation gain. I managed to carry Emry in the Ergo on my back on some significant uphills despite the congestion lingering in my throat.
Mist Trail, at the footbridge with a view up to Vernal Falls
We ate macaroni and cheese for dinner, ours with tuna mixed in. Super-easy, not at all fancy, quite tasty. Not in the Sunset magazine article about Great Camping Meals.
We had a great fire and smores.
It was colder than we had anticipated, especially overnight. Nobody slept that well. In the morning, Emry summed it up by saying, “That wasn’t sleep! That was just resting.”
But the kids had slightly-warm chocolate with a marshmallow in it, just how they like it. And we had via coffee packets with hot chocolate mixed in. A version of the drink we made a hundred times in South America that earned the name “vile brew.” Vile in a good way, if that makes sense.
Elan doing the classic tourist pose in Yosemite Valley
And then, on our way back down from our second hike, the rain that had been threatening started. We walked in the rain happily, not minding our wet feet.
Driving back through the valley, the rain cleared and we got to see the way the light and the fog and the colors all come out to play post-rain.
Serious “wow” view from the valley floor, between rain storms
We got back to our camp, but then it started to rain again. Even Mikhail, expert fire-starter, couldn’t get the wood we had bought in the valley, unfortunately a green batch, to get going enough to counteract the raindrops. Elan went under the picnic table, trying to stay dry.
It rained harder and harder. Two streams sprouted down the hillside and ran into our camp. One pooled directly in front of the bear box so I had to stand in it in my tennis shoes to access our increasingly damp supplies. Lakes formed at both entrances to the tent. Rain pooled inside the wells of the cookstove as I boiled water. The smoke from the dying fire billowed in front of our headlamps, obscuring our vision.
Emry was asleep in the car. Elan was hiding out in the tent.
We downgraded expectations. Instead of hot dogs, I made instant miso soup. Raindrops and pine needles landed in the cups as we drank it. I borrowed the neighbor’s fire – partially shielded by their open-aired canopy tent – to toast Elan’s marshmallow.
And then I looked around and thought – we could just leave now. We were planning to go the next morning. We wouldn’t miss much, except waking up to a wet morning and trying to light sodden wood into a fire and pack a drenched tent.
“We could just do that stuff now,” I said.
“We’re night people, not morning people,” Mikhail agreed.
And so we did. We packed that dripping camp up in about an hour – warp speed for us. We shoved everything wet and dry into bags and stuff sacks and plastic trash bags, crammed it all back in the car, and high tailed it out of there at 9:20 p.m., just in time for the rain to stop.
In the dark, we saw fog rising off of black pavement, a little fox sniffing the side of the road, and one muddy rock that tumbled under our car but thankfully did not appear to damage anything.
We stopped at a McDonald’s drive-through at 11 p.m. and got french fries and hot tea with two packets of honey in it.
We got home a little after 1 a.m., exhausted but happy to be home, the kids asleep 90% of the drive, behind us even Emry’s traditional desperate need to pee which always hits as we are driving through the sketchiest areas of Oakland.
Let’s hear it for having new adventures. For embracing the moments that no one takes pictures of, because it’s too wet, too loud, too cold, too late, too muddy, or because you can’t find your phone and your camera is broken.
I think we should start pinning those.
Let’s celebrate Plan D.
Wild spirit, baby. It doesn’t always look like what you think it will. It shows up in all kinds of forms, even bailing on the last night of camping.
And out of this experience, I have a Jewish New Year’s resolution: pack more ahead of time.
Time to go dry out a tent.
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