First time camping

Marshmallow · 03-16-2012, 10:21 PM

When was the first time you ever went camping? How was the reality different from your expectations? I was 12 years old, and we took air mattresses like you found back then in dime stores for floating in a pool. Mine deflated in the night and I slept on tree roots through the tent floor all night. I hated camping for a long time after that.

Hazel · 03-16-2012, 11:59 PM

My dad took us out to the rainforest in Guyana when I was 2 maybe. Camping in this country is cushy. 8 weeks a year in the jungle is what it's all about. Big things bite. He has a story about me being stalked by a big cat.

ppine · 03-17-2012, 01:20 AM

I would have to ask the folks because it has been my whole life. Started on day trips as an infant in Puerto Rico when my Dad was working on a graduate degree in tropical agriculture.

Bojib · 03-17-2012, 02:12 AM

Been going since before I can even remember. My parents started taking me camping when I was really young.

Grandpa · 03-17-2012, 02:52 AM

Very, very young. I really can't remember how early my big brothers started taking me up to the forest but I know for my seventh birthday, a brother took me to the top of one of the highest peaks via horseback. We had a packhorse and camped in a meadow surrounded by pines and quakies. Someone had hauled a board up to that peak and left it by the cairn. It was the custom to carve initials and age in that board. The board with my initials was still there when two of my daughters and my son carved theirs.

By age ten, I and a couple of friends were spending 2 or 3 days camped up in the canyon by ourselves. We'd get a mom to haul us up to the end of the road and another to come get us 3 days later. The gear we had at that age was too heavy for us to pack very far. We had us a secret spot just a few hundred yards from the end of the road.

Davefromva · 03-17-2012, 04:31 PM

I think I was 6 the first time I can remember camping. It was at a state park but there wasn't bathrooms or electricity when I went back in the mid 1980's at the park I was at. Ever since then I've gone camping every year but wasn't until a few years back that I started doing a lot of wilderness backpack camping.

Pathfinder1 · 03-17-2012, 05:25 PM

Hi...

Don't really know. Used to pretend camping when I was about eight years old, at a neighbor's house, with some friends, using an old blanket for a tent. I couldn't figure out why the blanket tent wouldn't shed rain.

Sometimes I would go into the woods with a pretend pack on my back (it was just a canvas folding chair!).

My folks would take me out sometimes, but I always found my way back.

By the time I was about eleven or twelve, I was hunting, trapping and fishing by myself. I would sometimes walk half a mile through woods and fields to visit a friend who was similarly inclined.

A couple of years later I built a crude hut/camp in the woods, and some friends and I...or sometimes just myself...would camp out there.

It was during my formative years that I developed a fondness for the outdoors, and I'm glad I did.

oldsarge · 03-17-2012, 11:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hazel

My dad took us out to the rainforest in Guyana when I was 2 maybe. Camping in this country is cushy. 8 weeks a year in the jungle is what it's all about. Big things bite. He has a story about me being stalked by a big cat.

What an experience! Love to hear about your jungle adventure. The jungle has a fond place in my heart.

Bojib · 03-18-2012, 09:57 AM

I guess this thread kept me thinking about it long enough to actually have a childhood memory.

I remember when I was really young, probably 5 years old or so, I had a camouflage tent that fit over my little bed. I had a sleeping bag and everything that I used, Alvin and the Chipmunks I believe (the old cartoon, not the new movies).

Ok, so that's not real camping, but it was fun. It was pretend camping at least.

My parents used to let me camp in the front yard too, and they live in such a rural area, that it is much more wilderness like than most camp grounds. I remember one night camping in the yard this horrible "monster" was clawing at my tent trying to get in with me. I was petrified, afraid to run back in, afraid to scream, and a few minutes later it made it's first cut into the tent. A few seconds after that our old house cat climbed in the hole, curled up and went to sleep with me. I don't know why it destroyed the tent when it could have just meowed at the door and been let in.

Like others here, at a young age I was always out in the hills hiking, learning important skills, putting my cubscout and boyscout abilities to work. I hated video games, and thought playing outside was much better (still do).

DMan · 03-18-2012, 02:40 PM

I was about 10 or 11. My parents were taking us to Niagara Falls and we were camping instead of staying in a motel. It was such a disaster that we ended up in a motel the next two nights. It poured rain and the tent which was borrowed, leaked. All of the air mattresses, also borrowed, deflated during the night. We never went camping again as a family. My wife and I though thoroughly enjoy it.