Signs that you're camping.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Just having returned from a glorious two weeks camping at the beach, and having much time to sit around each afternoon musing upon the meaning of life and shit, I have come up with a list of definitive signs that mean you’re camping.

  1. The unmistakeable squelch of thongs (flip flops) as you return from the shower block without having dried your feet properly.

  2. You’ll spend $68 dollars on bait to catch $4 worth of fish.

  3. When you send little kids to get wood for the fire, they come back with armloads of eucalyptus bark.

  4. When you send young men to get wood for the fire, they try to impersonate lumberjacks.

  5. It’s perfectly fine to be nursing a beer prior to 5pm.

  6. Tidy campsites mean the occupants are anal-retentive and yell at their kids a lot.

Who wants to add 7 and beyond? :slight_smile:

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  1. Crazy eights!
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Umm…this is more a sign that you’re not camping.

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Yeah, yeah, sue me. New changes to the fees in National Parks in Australia now mean it’s sometimes cheaper to go to a ‘primitive’ camping/caravan park…which we did. It had flush dunnies, showers and washing machines. With two littlies, it was heavenly to have the mod cons.

In three weeks we’re going true bush…but only for the long weekend. :smiley:

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Counterintuitively, you’re more embarrassed to let out a gigantic fart in the middle of the night than you would be at home. At home, you may wake your SO; while camping you may alert the entire campsite. Anonymity is your only defense.

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  1. You remember that Aerogard really is worse than mosquito bites.
  2. Maslow’s hierarchy becomes ammo, bait, diesel & ice (to paraphrase HG Nelson)
  3. and of course there’s the affirmation that what Americans call Survivor, Australians call camping.
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11). A relaxing and glorious activity can turn to complete hell by the simple addition of one commonplace further ingredient; rain.

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12). All foodstuffs must be locked away at night for fear of marauding bears, dingos, racoons, wolverines, platypus, etc.

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The motel doesn’t have pay TV.

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But the idiot at the campsite next to yours does have a portable TV-- which he plays at high volume.

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No wifi.

Well actually I have seen that at some campgrounds.

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Then there’s that whole question of having sex…

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Gaffigan is the indoorsy type.

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Regardless of whether or not the ambient temperature is 120F, the idiot upwind of you is going to light up a smoky campfire so that you can all stink equally. I used to like campfires when I was young. Now I hate them.

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Hot dogs and beans taste like a 5 star meal after a cold day hiking.

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  1. Waking up to the sound of zippers.

WTF? Most years I do a week long bicycling trip with about 300 other riders. We set up tents in the same place. Around day break people start getting out of their tents so you start hearing the sound of zippers all over the place.

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#) Feeding kids beans before they go to sleep in sleeping bags (in their own tent) is funny stuff.

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Packing up camp and getting out on the trail just past sunrise, having breakfast on the first summit of the day.

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One of the signs we use that “you may be a re-enactor”:

Using a $20,000 Harley as a drying rack for a $200 canvas tent

<guilty>

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From my HS summer camp:

Going to the toilet requires grabbing a shovel.
You can pick up tiny wild strawberries on the way to the toilet.
The pool is also DIY (we dammed the creek). The better, natural, rocky pool is in a different mountain stream, 7km away over a hump in the mountains.
The sound of bells does not mean a church: it means cows. Be careful as you leave the tent, they are tame but will get nervous if you get too close to a calf. That silhouette which just bumped into your tent? It looks like a cow and sounds like a cow because it is one.