Me. Roughing it.

I just returned home from a weekend of camping.

I've never camped before in my life--tent camped that is, which apparently is different from RV camping--DRASTICALLY different, I found.

Sure, my parents took me tent camping once as a child to which my body responded with spasms of diarrhea and vomiting. Obviously, I was developing an aversion that I would carry into adulthood.

Of late, I had thought I might like to camp, in a tent. I feel very alive outside--more and more as I age, and thought it would be a great way to connect with my primitive side, to nature.

So, below is a list of what I learned about and while camping:

1. Instant coffee might be overkill, because, I was informed, coffee is one of the easiest things to prepare in the rugged outdoors but overkill or not, it was a more than adequate replacement for what almost became my deal breaker.

2. Connecting with one's primitive side, does not, at least for me, have to involve sleeping on a sparsely padded tent floor subjecting the body to unnecessary bouts of pain and stiffness. My feet were just as dirty and my hair just as nappy on an air mattress loaned to me by a dear friend (who just rose ranks in my friend book when she offered this on my second night of camping.)

3. Some of the funniest things you will ever say happen immediately before, during and after a stint to the bathhouse at 3:00 in the morning when the entire family must rise, for safety, and make the journey together in service to your bladder.

4. My bladder is wretchedly small...and now my family knows.

5. There are not enough blankets in the world to cut the cold of sleeping outdoors.

6. We didn't mind sleeping 4 to a 3 person tent when we realized the necessity of body heat moving between us.

7. Tents do not come with automatic pulls or air pumps to inflate them. There is some effort involved in bringing them to being. Thank god for the Canadians at the neighboring campsite for saving us from our ignorance as we curiously studied the pile of nylon at our feet in our attempt to understand the method evading us.

8. Gnats just might be the Antichrist scattered into trillions of minions.

9. Monopoly is NOT a great camp site game. As if.

10. I don't mind an excuse to skip a shower...or two.

11. I didn't, not one time, miss the television.

12. My feet were the dirtiest they've ever been--once home, it took a round of body wash, another of apricot scrub and a pumice stone scrub to remove the dirt from the wrinkles of my feet and return them to their fleshy pink state.

And now that we are home and have been for a few days, I have loved the warmth of my bed and a toilet only a few feet away.