A Story About Camping

My current employer does this awesome thing where every Friday in July & August is given off to the entire company. No one works those days. They call it “R&R Fridays”, and it is amazing for work-life balance.

The first R&R Friday I drove up to a small town ~45min away and bought a ~10 year-old used popup camper.

I have a lot of memories from my childhood of playing with my cousins and sisters at campgrounds. My grandparents had a legit RV; not huge, but big enough to have a few beds, toilet, etc. So sometimes we’d sleep in the camper, sometimes in a tent, but the things I remember are running around with frisbees, wading into a lake, and sitting around the campfire (typically someone was singing; the Bean family is very musical).

The second R&R Friday, we took our kids out to a small State Park, ~45min away.

Camping has changed a lot versus the version I recall in my memories:

• The campgrounds were fairly crowded - this probably has to do with everyone (like me) wanting to get out and about after a good 14 months of COVID-19 isolation
• The campsites were small and close together - this is probably a case of kid perspective
• Camping is a lot more work than I remember - I blame being an adult

Now, we only camped for two nights, but the first entire day is spent “setting up the camp site”. This is mostly things like:

• getting the popup levelled and popped
• getting the cooler iced & situated
• getting firewood
• getting the camp chairs out and setup
• getting sleeping bags out & beds made
• etc, etc…

The second day we had some time to hike, etc, but also spent a lot of time digging out toys and games we brought, cleaning things off that got dirty, throwing trash away, etc.

And then the last day was basically spent packing all the stuff back up.

I couldn’t help feel like the more sh*t we brought, the more time was spent not actually enjoying camping. And we brought a lot of sh*t.

And then we walked past the richy-rich giant RV pull-through sites, and my god, those people are SLAVES to their shit. Televisions, stereos, portable dog pens, hammocks, smokers, tables, awnings, shade tents, screened tents, rugs, plants, decorations. W.T.F.

My wife and I aren’t big spenders. But we also don’t live minimistically. I would rather buy something more expensive that will last; she’d rather get a “deal” on cheap plastic crap that will be thrown away in under a year (I razz her for this pretty consistently). Overall our house is uncluttered, and we don’t keep too much around that doesn’t get used.

However, I’ve always been drawn to minimalistic living. From tiny houses, to people that live/travel out of a single backpack, to small-cabin wilderness living. Something about living WITHOUT a bunch of STUFF rings of FREEDOM.

And I guess that is the point of this post. Camping this weekend really reminded me of the age old addage.

Well said, Brad Pitt.