The Great Outdoors...I'll Pass Thanks

"Let's go camping Dad!"

Few other phrases make me cringe quite as much. I just don't get it. Why do people want to go camping? Didn't we evolve and develop our society to move forward from our primitive hunter-gatherer roots? I just fail to see the appeal.

Now let's be clear, I'm not talking about the rolling luxury suites that are larger than most urban apartments and far more comfortable. I'm talking about 'real' camping: Sleeping on the ground, in a tent, with a sleeping bag, and cooking over a fire. If your camping adventure includes a mattress, a kitchen, indoor plumbing, wall to wall carpeting, and most of all air conditioning, that isn't really camping and certainly not what my wife and kids have in mind. No, their definition involves becoming one with the mosquitoes, eating charred hot dogs covered in the floating ash of kindling, and the togetherness that can only come from cramming 4 rectangular bodies into a hexagonal tent. They seem to think that the fun lies in learning the intricate contours of the earth with my vertebrae, or hiking 200 yards to use a campground bathroom, a hike that seems far longer in the cold morning light for a shower of cold to tepid water under a trellis of spider webs.

To add insult to injury, our sad little tent is usually surrounded by RVs and we are forced to try to find slumber amongst the whir of their A/C compressors kicking on and off all night long. Not that anyone is sleeping anyway, since the tent turns into a sauna once the zipper is closed, only to find that the sauna has mystically turned into a cold damp cave come morning and everything inside is wet.

So next time the kids ask to go camping, I'll just pretend I can't here them over the TV and A/C while I lay on my comfy bed.