How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Our vacations as kids were spent mostly at campgrounds, and we slept in either tents, shelters, or the family pop-up camper. Once I slept on a picnic table, but I don't recommend that. Meals were prepared by our mother, and we kids would help out by bringing a bucket to the campground faucet for dish and cooking water. There was always something fun to do, either walking around to see what was going on, or going swimming. We did some family things like hiking or visiting fish hatcheries or state parks. With seven kids, there was always someone to hang around with.

One year we skipped the campground scene and stayed at a house in Vermont. There was no beach in sight, but there were deer in the back yard. It must have been an easier vacation for my overworked mother, since she had a real kitchen and even plumbing. We did get in the car for drives to a lake a few times for swimming, but I think the house was pretty isolated. One day my father took a handful of us for a walk in the woods along the path of some power lines. My father's sense of direction has always operated more on optimism than accuracy and we didn't make our way back to the house until well after dark, hours after we had left. My mother had to have been beside herself with worry, but she didn't let it show in front of us.

Then my mother's best-friend-since-high-school and her three kids started going camping with us, usually at Lakeside Pines in Maine. They were the same ages as three of us, and we all of a sudden were having even more fun on our summer vacations. Ten kids was somehow twice the fun of seven. And our mother always seemed younger when we went on these vacations. Even through our potentially difficult teen years it was all good. Those vacations are some of my favorite childhood memories.

When we had our first daughter, I wanted to recapture some of the fun from those fantastic vacations, and I booked a vacation at Lakeside Pines for our little family. Our daughter was only 11 months old, and it took some time to pack the Chevy S-10 pickup with the basic baby necessities. Fortunately there was enough room in the truck bed for everything we would need for a week in a cabin (no tent or camper for us with a baby). We were a little surprised that the entire truck was filled, but babies need STUFF. We drove the couple of hours to the campground, spouse unloaded everything from the truck, and we took the baby for a little play time at the beach. She had fun and we had fun watching her. We bought food at the campground store, we had a meal, I washed the floor of the cabin a couple of times (to no avail) because I didn't want the baby to get filthy crawling around.

"Camping" got old really quick. Once darkness fell, since there was no TV, there wasn't much to do, and when I was getting the bed set up and a giant spider ran across the mattress, I told spouse that it was the last straw and the camping vacation was over. He went to tell the office staff that we were leaving, and they said they would refund our money if they were able to rent the cabin. Spouse again loaded the truck with all the baby stuff, and we set off for home in the sprinkles, and got there some time before midnight. There's no place like home... there's no place like home. I will always remember that, in addition to all the great childhood vacations there, Lakeside Pines was where our daughter took her first steps. But I still didn't ever want to go back to the camping life; we spent our summer vacations for the next several years visiting a nice hotel on Cape Cod.