I know a lot of people who love to go camping. I am not one of them, and except for maybe when I was a teenager, never really have been. I want those luxurious camp grounds with real rooms with comfortable beds and private bathrooms thank you very much. I think they are called hotels. So, Z. has not had a childhood of camping experiences I’m afraid. Since she hates bugs this isn’t too terrible. This summer though she’ll get her fill. This week she has been at a nature camp, a day camp except that last night they had a camping overnight. Tiny tents on the ground, lots of bugs and s’mores I’m guessing (I’ll pick her up later this afternoon and will get the scoop then). A. and I went out to dinner and drank wine and talked about how nice it was that Z. got to go camping and we go to go out to dinner 🙂
In July she goes to overnight camp for 2 weeks, cabins in the woods with actual beds, but still very much outdoorsy and camping like. After two weeks of that she will probably appreciate her own bed and lack of bugs in it a lot more. I really enjoyed my camp experiences like this when I was a kid and hope that she will too. These are her first overnight camp experiences, she’s been going to day camps of various types for years.
The only thing that creeps me (and her) out is the ticks/Lyme disease thing. They do tick checks at her camp this week and I check her ears and the back of her head when she gets home. Then she jumps in the shower and checks the private places. So far so good. We have been spraying her with bug spray in the morning (the Cutter Advanced that has Picaridin in it, not Deet- so far so good) and I sent her off with it for the overnight. The two week overnight camp is going to be a lot harder as she’s going to have to be responsible for doing all this herself.
It will definitely be weird having her gone for 2 whole weeks, but I am excited for her as I think she will have a blast in spite of the bugs. A. and I are still working on taking a few days vacation ourselves while she is away, but we’ve dilly dallied so long that airfares are skyrocketing so we’re not sure what to do at the moment. We’ll figure it out, but wherever we go it won’t be a hot humid place with lots of bugs!
I hope she loves the camping! It can be so much fun, really it can!
I’m not much of a camping fan either — unless it’s in a camper. Rhiannon didn’t want to go to camp this year at all. She said it was because she would miss us too much, but I really think it was the spiders. She’s always been very afraid of spiders (used to wake up screaming during nightmares about them!) and last year, they slept in tents with platforms at camp (in previous years, they’d had cabins). On the FIRST night, she came to bed to find a spider on her pillow. She slept terribly all week after that.
I offered to find a camp with cabins, but she couldn’t be talked into it no matter what. It’s too bad too, because she LOVED camp the past three years, spiders aside.
What L said! (I hope she loves the camping)
But on the subject of ticks – the other evening my Z pushed his hair aside and then said “what’s that, some kind of dead bug on me?” But no, it was a tick. Ick! They creep me out, too. I let his dad (who has lots of tick experience) deal with that situation. It wasn’t a deer tick or the kind that carry rocky mtn spotted fever, thank goodness. We had been outdoors in a sort of wooded area that afternoon and were actually more concerned about poison ivy exposure, but there’s no way to know if that’s where he got it.