My Husband: “Honey, why don’t we go camping?”
Me: Darlin, bless your heart, aren’t you sweet. “You don’t have to take me camping, I can make you miserable as hell right here at home?”
Watching mindless daytime television this morning, I was told that one way to spice up your love life is to go camping with your partner. Really? I have no idea what channel I was watching because we recently changed our cable carrier but I do know the lady who staged this as a good idea looked more like a wildebeest than a woman. My best bet told me that she was already spiced up enough. I bet her body had not seen a razor since the 70’s. She was wearing typical camping attire, which is far to earthy for me, and displaying the items needed for this trip into hell. If I want to spice up my love life it is going to involve a 5 star hotel, a massage, a nice dinner, liquor, and lots of nudity, air conditioning and A BED! There is only one tent I would want to see pitched and that would be a man under the sheets ready to rumble and would NOT involve metal stakes, canvas, a zipper and a patch of ground between two trees. I cannot imagine a worse vacation than to camp, with anyone. I have not ever been able to understand why people bust their ass daily to work, take care of a family and a home for the goal of taking a vacation to live like a homeless person. To each his own I guess. I would honestly rather pay a visit to my Gynecologist and stay all day rather than camp for 5 minutes (but then again, my gyno is HOT). I love to take a hot shower or bath, brush my teeth, eat in comfort a hot meal that does not include gorp and sleep in an air-conditioned house in a BED! I see no comfort or relaxation in hanging my food in a damn tree so bear’s won’t get it??? Seriously? Zipping myself into a tent, sleeping on a mat or hanging my ass out of said tent to take a piss. I could not give a shit less about being at one with nature. Who the hell would want to heat up their love life by going sans shower for two days with a man or woman that smells like a goat rubbed down with a bag of onions? Gee honey you smell like wide open ass, wanna fool around??? Gross! Morning breath is bad enough when you brushed your teeth just prior to going to bed but two days later? Not for me, not in this life anyway.
I married a man that loves to camp and would love me to camp with him. All I can say to that is either this brotha is old enough to live with disappointment or he has by now figured out he married the wrong woman. To his credit, he did talk me into camping with him ONCE while we were dating. I agreed to go because we were going to be camping at the beach. How romantic right? WRONG. It was in late October or early November and the beach this time of year is like The Bering Straight. Cold, wet, windy and completely void of life outside of the water. BUT there were no bugs, creepy crawlers and it was at the beach so no bears either I was guessing. Fine, great way to score some cool points and how bad could it be. It was cold as crap and it rained the entire time, I mean the entire time! I went with him and two friends. I did enjoy the company (great guys) but I decided then and there that it would never happen again unless I was airlifted and dropped like a box of supplies onto an island or up in the mountains. That being the case, I would probably figure that I only had about 24 hours until something found me, ate me or at a minimum scared me into cardiac arrest so I would just go ahead and impale myself on something sharp to get it over with!
We camped at a “camp ground” and I use that term loosely that was adjacent to the beach, again how bad can this be right? Well it kinda sucked because of the cold and the rain. We had several substances to keep us well lit the entire time so the cold was tolerable but the no shower part was terrible and hanging my ass out of a tent to pee ranked right up there with a pap smear, no way to waste a Saturday with absolutely nothing wrong with it. And the rain, sweet Mary mother of God, the rain was just short of a monsoon! I was told there were bathhouses on “site” but I dared NOT enter those. They were a good distance away from our tent anyway and it was so cold and wet that I could not even fathom the walk. So for the first time since I was an infant I actually had a chapped ass! My face and anything else exposed was wind burned and I had never been so f**king hungry in MY LIFE. To this day peanuts and granola together make me heave. The guys basically went to fish and were not all too happy about taking a chick with them but hey, their boy was in love so they took one for the team. I thought well, I do want to spend time with him so I guess I can give it a try and surely there will be something else other than fishing. THERE WAS NOT!! We (hell no not me) fished all day, stopped long enough to eat camping food and then went back to fishing. We fished all freakin night. It was so damn dark that you could not even tell we were on the beach. Somewhere along the drive to this trip I had the presence of mind to spend about $30 on magazines and a good book so this was to be my saving grace. I drank myself silly then crawled into the back of my then boyfriends jeep and read, ate, slept, drank, ate, drank, read, slept, smoked like I had kids in Al Qaeda and occasionally got out long enough to pee. Thank God at this time of the year you can take your vehicle and your dog on the beach. We did not have a dog they had me! I was f**king miserable! I did however win the atta girl award from the boys because (this is the part NO ONE believes) I did not complain even one time! I now know I was suffering from ECTTSD (enduring camping trip traumatic stress disorder). I was honestly to awe struck at how miserable I was to even muster a complaint. The car ride home was the nastiest thing I have ever felt. I could smell myself, my boyfriend and was chapped in any place the wind hit me! The wind had blown all the water out of my eyes so I could hardly blink. My damn stomach growled for 2 days straight. We did go one night (because it was raining so hard we couldn’t see and it hurt our skin when it hit) to a dive that had dime shrimp. I ate like a damn hostage, slumped over my plate like the warden was about to grab it from me. I should have told my waitress I had been kidnapped, then shanked my kidnappers and begged someone to take me to my embassy! I drank beer out of a can that looked like motor oil and ate so damn many shrimp that I was afraid I was going to die from histamine poisoning. My cholesterol level shot up to 1247, I swelled up like a poisoned puppy and my next thought was great, where the hell am I going to expel of all this when it works its way through to my colon? Not to worry, I was so stopped up jihad couldn’t have dislodged all the gorp, alcohol, ham sandwiches, everything from the “ito” family and shrimp from my body! HOWEVER one of my many motto’s is, there is a pill for everything, they don’t call me Colonel Parker for nothing, so I dipped into my trusty bag of tricks to see what I brought to numb the pain of this trip. Being the smart girl I am, I decided an antihistamine would at least keep my ticker from jumping ship and my throat from slamming shut on me. It was in fact the little 25mg bullet that would render me stoned! So I swallowed one with some of my beer from the oil can. Have I mentioned yet how nasty this beer was? A shot of hemlock would have tasted better and allowed for far better repercussions! This crap was so dark it looked like the urine bag of a kidney transplant patient and tasted like wolf piss would probably taste! The smell even burned my already dry eyes. No matter what I did, I could not get the taste out of my mouth. I asked our waitress (a very salty broad who had obviously never left the beach. She had wrinkles so deep you could hide the New York Times and a pack of cigarettes in them) if a coke was out of the question. It was because their fountain machine was not working and the rep could not get there for a couple of days so she brought me some tea. This substance she called tea was nothing but beach water with a tan and some sugar in it. Any idea what beach water does to the intestinal system? Montezuma probably served beach water for his revenge. I was actually ok with this because I was going to need something drastic to get all this sludge out of my body. All I could hope for is that it would kick in while we were still in the restaurant. No such luck. It hit me later that night while we were back at our tent. I spent the remainder of that evening hanging my ass out of my god forsaken (bedroom) tent cleaning out my body and defacing the environment. Enough said on that matter.
The next day we woke up early early early. What the hell else do you do when you are sleeping in a wet tent, on the ground and its 30 degree’s outside? We fixed a nice breakfast on a camping stove, made decent coffee then started packing for home. I am not even going to go into the whole packing out what you pack in phenomenon other than to say it is much less than savory to smell and feel like shit and have to ride for a bit with 3 days worth of trash in the car with you. We pulled into the driveway at home and got out. I helped get all that shit out of the car when all I wanted to do was set fire to it, car and all and go take a shower. When I looked at the shower I honestly felt like one of the hostages coming off the plane from the Iran hostage situation. Who is president, where am I and someone please give me a towel, a toothbrush, a blowtorch and a bottle brush so I can wash this horrible event from my skin! We took a shower and went straight to bed! I think I woke up 6 days later. Not really, we slept for 3 or 4 hours then went out to a really nice dinner. My boyfriend (who is now my husband) said, “Now it wasn’t that bad was it, you actually had a good time didn’t you?” My thought was first to stab him right through the breast plate, second it wasn’t that bad if you consider syphilis acceptable and third if you never ask me to do that again! I said, “no sweetie, it wasn’t bad, I enjoyed most of it.” Also thinking to myself, now when is my quiz on all the mindless crap I read about in Cosmo, Ladies Home Journal and People? He said, “Well one thing is for sure, you are quite the little trooper.” Good I thought, just don’t call me a happy camper!
We are now married and he still holds out the hope that I will one day be his fishing and camping buddy. This is among one of the reasons he lives in denial. He does however get the opportunity to camp with a group of students for a week each summer and I highly suggest that he take it because given the choice between a firing a squad or camping with children, I say blindfold me and aim high!
Nice!
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