Camping Report: Sleeping and Eating

SLEEPING

The sleeping part hasn't been quite as bad as I feared. The friend who kept telling us how good air mattresses are now was not wrong. We started out with Matt and I sleeping in the tent with Eve and Angus would bunk in with another family who had a big kids' tent. Then we bought a little one-man tent and I slept in that, especially when I couldn't rent a battery pack for my CPAP, so I didn't keep Matt and Eve awake listening to brain being deprived of oxygen all night. I kind of loved my private little bunk with everything within reach, until I had to get up in the morning or to go to the bathroom in the night. The tent wasn't high enough to stand up in, and I could never figure out a way to get out of the tent that wasn't uncomfortable and humiliating (unless Matt was up and I could just sit on the edge of the air mattress and yell for him to come grab my hands and forklift me out). 

This year we decided that Angus would sleep in the little tent and I would move back to the big tent (I had a battery pack for the CPAP). It worked okay - it would have worked better if I had figured out earlier that I should roll over and stand up in the tiny space between the two air mattresses and walk out of the tent instead of still scrunching to the end of my air mattress and trying to stand up that way, leading to the same problem (thrashing around like a whale, flashing the entire tent if I was wearing a nightgown, despairing of the whole camping enterprise in four wretched seconds). 

The first night I often sleep very little - one year somebody talked about those brutal nights when you go to the bathroom before bed and don't manage to fall asleep before you have to get out and go to the bathroom again, and the first night it TOTALLY HAPPENED. Eve and I had also gone a day early and somehow the pump for my air mattress didn't get loaded so I was, in fact, pretty much sleeping on the ground (Eve's mattress had a different pump somehow, I'm not sure why, the ones we have now are all the same). This year I brought melatonin and slept fine the first night once I fell asleep. On the third night the melatonin (probably) gave me horrible twitchy legs and it took me forever to fall asleep, but it wasn't my worst year for sleeping, and honestly the not-sleeping probably didn't have much to do with being in a tent.

EATING

I think the first year we came everybody was still largely cooking all their own meals. Soon after we went to a system of each family doing one dinner. It was a bit daunting cooking something for twenty-ish people, but overall it was still easier only having to cook once, and as a group we tend to run as a pack, so it increases our togetherness time. It also led to the dinner game being upped considerably.

I tend to cook at home first and do some variation on chicken and ribs, with some kind of grilled corn salad because Collette demands grilled corn salad and she is a benevolent god when sufficiently appeased. Matt's a better camping cook, but he does so much of the prep and set-up (and cooks breakfast most camp mornings) that it's my major contribution. Others in the group are better at camp cooking, and happy to go into town and buy a giant chunk of meat to cook over a fire. One year Eve and I got there and set up just before it started raining, and then went over to the dinner campsite where there was enough tarp rigged up for everyone to sit and stay dry, and we were served a four-star meal around the campfire. 

A few years ago we began a new tradition consisting of the people putting on dinner also serving a drink. We looked up drink recipes and made flavoured simple syrups and brought fun garnishes, but mostly this consisted of emptying an entire bottle of liquor into a massive jug. One year I made a bourbon peach lemonade and was really excited because I got to buy a bottle of Wild Turkey.

Other than that, we mostly follow the directive Collette gave me before year one, which was "just don't try to bring anything healthy". Heavy on packaged and nitrates. I think one year the group total of cans of Pringles exceeded fifty. This year Matt did a better job of actually budgeting two bags of chips (one for the beach, one for the campfire) and one package of cookies per day, and we brought less home. We do pack some fruit and vegetables, but the theme of the week is definitely not austerity, or even moderation.

Every morning while we're doing beach prep, I make four sandwiches on the picnic table - ham and cheese and lettuce for everyone except Eve, who gets salami. We have coolers, but I can't bring myself to pack turkey. I find my little sandwich operation quite satisfying. Everyone carries a folding chair and a towel, Matt carries the beach shelter, Angus rolls the cooler with drinks and food (which is easy on the road and really freaking hard on the beach), and I carry my beloved beach bag with the myriad pockets, with books, sunscreen, more food, and miscellaneous crap. I adore this bag, even though I realized this year that it would make a lot more sense to designate certain pockets for certain things, rather than searching every single pocket every single time I need to find something.