On camping

Yes, I know it’s Thursday instead of Wednesday, okay. I got lazy yesterday, so sue me. In my defence, the day before yesterday I got back home after one day of a planned 2-day camping trip and just crashed.

See, in early March, after a few months of schools being shut and being cooped up indoors with two feral screenkids shouting at each other and various devices all damn day, I got angry enough with the state of things to book a camping trip for the spring break, because I wanted an enforced amount of time away from screens before I threw them all into the sea.

I found a nearby campsite we could get to by cab, my partner pitched his small tent in the back garden to see how many of us could fit in (it turns out me and the boys fit in just fine, but he had to sleep under a tarpaulin), we bought new ground mats and set about planning logistics. I knew we had to make it work for the time booked, because by May half-term – when the weather is nicer – I would be too pregnant and grumpy to camp.

Fervently hoping to stargaze, I told my partner to intend for clear skies in whatever way he had the energy for, because full-on magic is something I frankly don’t have a lot of time or mental energy for right now, so I outsource. (One of the many benefits of coupling with someone witchy!)

After packing a fair amount of things, but evidently not enough of the right things as you’ll see later, we cabbed it to the campsite and pitched up. Which, to be fair to the campsite, was lovely! It was a quiet patch of land on a farm in the countryside, and there were some very cute animals running around. We noticed other families pitching up, noting that a) they had cars and b) could therefore bring posher tents and more things. Oh well! How hard can camping on a budget be!

Ha! Hahaha. Ha.

Our first mistake was going on a long walk instead of chillaxing and building a fire. By the end of it, we had two miserable children and not much time to get a blaze going. My partner went into man mode trying to get a fire lit, only admitting after one failed attempt that he hadn’t built a campfire in a fire bowl before. I grumpily elbowed him out of the way and got a fire going decently enough to cook the hot dogs and sweetcorn we brought. At least I got to introduce my kids to proper campfire s’mores, which were probably the highlight of the trip.

Then it was time to hunker down in the tent for some shuteye. One slight problem: after the sun set, the temperature plummeted to 0°C, so despite huddling with two kids in a tiny tent, we were all very, very cold. Thankfully, their sleeping bags were thicker than mine, and my partner’s was an outdoor bag, which meant that he didn’t freeze to death under his tarpaulin.

The temperature probably would have been surmountable, had we packed actual camping mattresses and pillows. As it was, however, I found myself tossing and turning on the unforgiving surface of a thin camping mat on the hard ground, flanked by two similarly-restless children and kicked repeatedly in the bladder by a restless foetus.

When I couldn’t hold it in anymore, I climbed over my eldest and pulled my shoes on with my numbed, chapped hands, neglecting to bring a torch as I marched to the camp toilets. On the way back to the tent, I looked up – the sky was perfectly clear, and full of big, bright stars. My eyes streamed with cold as I picked out Ursa Major, before I had to put my head back down and concentrate on finding our pitch in the pitch-black so I could warm two kids with my body heat.

Reader, I got no sleep. Instead, I got hip pain from the ground, and also for some reason the Hebrew linguistic acronym begadkefat bounced around my head on loop. Begadkefat. Begadkefat. What does it mean, I thought to myself. (It turns out that the Hebrew letters involved have their sounds modified when fronted by a long vowel. Now you know!)

At 5 in the morning, my youngest wailed that he needed the toilet. Thankfully(?), my partner also hadn’t slept and so was on hand to bundle him up in his coat and shoes whilst my eldest and I also got ourselves ready. We took a family trip to the toilets, where we learned that none of us had actually slept. As nobody was actually getting any rest, my partner and I confined the children to the tent whilst we I built a large enough campfire to keep us somewhat warm and cook breakfast.

When the fire was finally warm enough, my eldest came to warm his hands and asked why my partner and I were talking about leaving after breakfast. ‘I want to stay another night!’

Ha! Hahaha. Ha. No.

Our takeaways from this experience are to intend for warm weather rather than clear skies, given that clear skies at this time of year are invariably accompanied by freezing nights; pack more padding; and look how about we just pitch up in the garden this summer okay. I’ll make s’mores bars in the oven. We can put as many pillows and blankets in the tent as we like. And I can retire my grumpy pregnant ass to an actual bed.