Camping - Food Edition (after which I will stop milking one measly camping trip for blog posts)

I was prepared to rough it in the bush food-wise - Collette told me "just forget trying to eat healthy - it's easiest if you just buy crap." I went to Loblaws and crowded my cart with club pack boxes of every processed snack available, and filled in the spaces with chips and cookies. I only bought meat that had enough nitrates in it to last three weeks without refrigeration. I bought CHEEZ FREAKING WHIZ.

I had not reckoned on my husband, "Hibachi Man". We had a Coleman stove, but I don't think he used it at all. He used a little Hibachi and the grate over the campfire. He also brought actual meat. He made hamburgers.

He made steak and potatoes. And lit candles. 

He made french toast and bacon. 

He warmed up cinnamon buns in a cast iron pan over the fire. 

Then there was the parade of giant hunks of meat, courtesy of Mark and Dan and Auspit.

This is pork.

This is beef. 

...wrapped in bacon. 

It was four days of torture and deprivation, obviously.

Since my husband spent much of his youth practically camping professionally, I left the set-up and procedures pretty much entirely to him - I just put stuff where he told me to. I probably should have paid some attention to the fact that he hasn't actually camped for twenty years or so, and double-checked with him that ALL of the food had been put in the van before we bedded down on the first night.

Instead, I woke up to strange sounds outside the tent. Since I have marked tendencies to over-imaginative hysteria and I DON'T CAMP, I naturally thought "AXE MURDERER", not "FORAGING WILDLIFE", and whacked Matt frantically so he could.... I dunno, get out of the tent and distract the psychopath while Eve and I ran away? Since he was in his compact sleeping bag and he's a little less, um, compact than in the past, he kind of flopped off his air mattress still IN the sleeping bag, opened the tent flap, yelled something, then wriggled out of the sleeping bag and got out of the tent. After a moment, I realized two things: 1) I didn't hear anything that sounded like an axe thunking into a person, and 2) I had to pee. I crawled out of the tent to see Matt standing a little ways away, trying to figure out how to wrestle our cooler lid out of the grip of two raccoons, who didn't look in the least inclined to give way. I looked down and said "did they take my shoe too?" and he said "no, I threw it at them". The raccoons eventually wandered away, Matt gave me my shoe back, and I went to the outhouse while he put ALL the food in the van.

A couple of nights later while we were at the drive-in, another family had their kitchen tent ransacked and plundered for a number of bread products, which made Matt feel better. After we got back from the movie, he lit a small fire for us after the kids went to bed. We were sitting there talking, and then he got up to adjust the firewood, so I clicked on the flashlight for him. Then I heard a rustling sound off to the left, in the wooded lot behind out campsite. I turned the flashlight beam to the left, and - okay, I didn't get a picture, so you have to imagine this one dark, and just the heads, stacked one on top of the other.

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"Do you have any Grey Poupon?"
Photo by Auberon_

They stared at me for a second, then very subtly pulled their heads back behind the tree trunk. You could almost hear them whispering "I don't think she saw us."

We came home with part of the beef roast (score!), forty-two granola bars and a couple of good stories.