We Became the People We Used to Mock

Chapter 10 of my work-in-progress camping memoir

A picture of our new Gray Wolf, shortly after we bought it, July 2014. Photo by Sarah Styf

I started working on a camping memoir five years ago but abandoned it after a year of detailed work because the time just wasn’t right. Now I am ready to get back to the work I started and turn it into a true memoir of the first 21 years of marriage and parenting. If you want to get regular updates on this project, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

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We never regretted our decision to buy the Roo. When we bought it, there were so many things that we didn’t know. We didn’t know if it would actually make camping more possible. We didn’t know how much camping we would do with it. We didn’t know anything about pulling a camper and driving long distances with an extra twenty-five to thirty feet behind us. We didn’t know how to park a camper and what kind of spots we could and could not easily get into.

In short, we didn’t know anything.

But once we had our camper safely stored in our oversized driveway for the winter and we were able to talk and evaluate the four months of camping we had done as a family, we knew a lot more. And while the discussion was still hypothetical, we were already talking about the next camper and what we would need to have in our next camper to justify buying something bigger.

We realized that we wouldn’t be able to keep our son and daughter sharing a double bed for forever, because it was ok for them at two and four years old, but that wasn’t going to last for very long. We thought about our desire for longer trips and realized that we wanted more interior room for those longer trips. And Jeff and I wanted a little more privacy and separation from our kids.

It also helped that we had just finished paying off our car and credit card debt was disappearing every month. We were in a much better financial position than we had been even a year earlier before we discussed buying any kind of camper.

At the end of that winter, we returned to the Fort Wayne camper show and fell in love with a bunkhouse camper that we could actually afford. It had everything that we had listed on our “must-have” list. It had bunk beds in the back with storage so the kids could pack their own stuff in their own cabinets and there was one more spot if they wanted to bring along a friend or a cousin. It had a full outdoor kitchen with a dorm sized refrigerator and two-burner stove so that I could cook outside without setting up extra equipment. It had sliding doors so that we could shut out the kids and it had enough floor space so that Sierra could find her own spot without worrying about the humans disrupting her personal space.

So we did it. We bought the camper we really wanted. And we couldn’t wait to get out on the road again.

Our test run with the new camper was a return to Chain O’ Lakes State Park, a park that was close enough that we didn’t have to drive very far and we could still return home if we discovered that we needed something else. It gave us a chance to try out everything that our camper had to offer while also celebrating Lydia’s birthday.

Our summer of camping and our introduction to life with a bigger RV with different challenges had begun. We headed up to Pokagon State Park for Memorial Day weekend, finding a bigger spot that was much easier to maneuver. Then, shortly after our Memorial Day weekend, we headed back to southern Indiana. After years away from our Indianapolis church’s yearly campout, we decided to once again join the fun. We could kill two birds with one stone, going on a camping trip and celebrating our son’s third birthday during the same weekend.

While most of the camping crew had changed from our years living in Indy, the most important part of the trip was camping with my sister’s family, giving the cousins much needed time to play together and reacquaint themselves with family that they didn’t see nearly enough. It also gave us a chance to experience the beauty of camping fellowship. We loved the moments that we got to escape as a family of four, but from time to time, it was nice to also share in that camping experience with close friends and family.

The importance of camping with others when given the opportunity came through at 2:00 AM when my husband, irritated that his wife, who normally falls asleep on the couch the moment she sits down in front of the TV, was still talking to her sister in the bathroom. This irritation grew into panic when our son, in the wee hours of his birthday, rolled out of his bed, falling from the top bunk and hitting his head on the ladder leading up to our daughter’s bunk. He finally banged on the bathroom door, yelling to let me know that our son had fallen out of his bed and now had a bleeding head wound. The news sent me racing across the campground, miraculously jumping over the shadows of roots without the guidance of a flashlight without falling flat on my face, and my sister heading in the opposite direction to get one of her best friends, who also happens to be a nurse.

I held my son, ice and a washcloth pressed against the back of his head, while our resident nurse did her best to assess a tired, sad little boy to determine if we needed to leave in the middle of the night to drive nearly an hour on dark country roads to find an emergency care clinic. In the end we decided to stay put, secure in the knowledge that for the next twelve hours we would have access to a nurse and aware that he would have his yearly doctor check-up within the next week. Our son started his third birthday with a bang, and we bought a rail guard before our next camping trip to keep that from happening again.