Clamping Down on Glamping

Have you heard of glamping? Apparently it means glam camping, which in turns means glamorous camping, which in turn means camping in luxury and style.

This continued shortening of words and terms is the topic of a whole other blog. I'll just say here that by the beginning of the next decade someone will have shortened "glamping" to "gl":

"Hy, cm gl w/us, s cl!"

(Translation: "I'm too lazy to type vowels".)

As I understand it, glamping is bringing modern luxury to the back-to-nature movement, and yes, it's just as ridiculous as it sounds. Unless you're doing it--then it's cool. Haul a tent in a backpack? I don't think so. No, you drive your SUV up to a yurt equipped with not only electricity, but a hot tub that will be filled on request by your butler.

Oh, a yurt is kind of a round, semi-permanent tent. And boy, am I shortening that explanation.

Or, rather than heading for a cabin or cottage, you could bring your glampiness with you. For this you'll need an RV of some kind, something about the size of, say, your actual home. Unless your home is a bit too small. You can camp in a trailer that would be too big for the typical mobile home park, or one with an engine that you drive around the same way a helmsman pilots an aircraft carrier. That way you have room for the hot tub, not to mention the big screen TV and the generator necessary to power both. And don't forget your satellite dish! You'll need your recliner, duh.

My first camping experience? A blanket draped over the clothesline out back. The grass was kind of itchy, but soft enough for a ten year old.

A fire, a pan ... keep it simple.

I'm thinking that a balance between the two might be more reasonable.

I mean, if you're taking your whole house with you on vacation, why not stay home? No matter what you see on the commercials, you're not going to open your front door and stand there looking out over the Grand Canyon with a coffee cup in your hand. You're going to be in a campground with a bunch of other camping vehicles. You'll have to unhook that little SUV you're towing to get to the canyon anyway, so why not save gas and just drive the SUV?

Hey, you can watch the big game on the big screen from your hot tub at home. Well, I can't, but I could watch Doctor Who on my medium screen from my couch.

When my wife and I first went camping it was with a two man tent and a couple of sleeping bags, which is still pretty close to the other end of the spectrum from glamping. I've discovered two things since:

First, my back had become too old to sleep on bare ground.

Second, a two man tent is fine for two, but doesn't work for two plus an eighty-five pound dog.

"You want me to sleep in THAT?"

But camping shouldn't include everything, including the kitchen sink. My wife was a long-time Girl Scout, and would be embarrassed to go camping with anything resembling a kitchen sink. On the other hand, I had no desire to go all survivalist, wandering into the wilderness with nothing but a survival knife and an extra pair of socks. (Although the socks are nice.)

Our compromise:

An eight man tent, assuming the eight men are average sized and kind of jammed in side by side, like a line of sardines. In our case that leaves room for a double sized inflatable mattress, a small folding table, and a folding chair (I need the chair to get around in the morning--see above about my old back.) ... with floor space left over for the dog. A little extra floor space, because every hour or so he likes to get up, do a quick patrol, then lay back down in a different spot. That's fine at home, but in a tent it's about a three foot patrol.

"Who's watching the back door? Where IS the back door?"

For two people who grew up poor, and whose idea of luxurious camping was having a floor on the tent, that's pretty luxurious. Especially since we added two extras:

One, a car-top carrier. It turns out a lot of our camping gear used to go in the back seat, which is now fully occupied by dog.

"No, I'm not sharing this with two folding chairs and a cooler."

Two, a fifty foot electric cord and a power strip. Yes, at my insistence we gave in on the luxury of electricity, at least when we can get a campsite with power. No, no hot tubs, but we power two phones, a camera, a Kindle (bedtime reading), and my laptop.

Yes, my laptop, leave me alone. I get some of my best writing done on a picnic table by the fire. That's the life.

And that's the closest I get to glamping.

Lead, Follow Me, or Just Watch the Videos

I used to blog every day, after hearing authors say it kept their names in front of their readers. Then I realized blogging every day left me with no time to actually write anything for readers to read. Also, I'm not interesting every day--even after editing myself.

But this time I've been away from my blog for two whole weeks, which might be a record. I actually had a real vacation, by which I mean I not only didn't do my full time job, I didn't even work on  writing. (We did spend a portion of our vacation in medical facilities, but that's tradition.)

I missed it. The writing, not the full time job. But sometimes a guy's gotta take a break.

But I wasn't totally offline. We've taken some very short videos in places we visited--I've posted a half dozen on Instagram so far, and they cross posted to Twitter and Facebook. They're fun videos, kinda, and give you a little sense of where we were, maybe, and if you turn the volume all the way up you can hear me, sorta. (I'm new to the video thing, and haven't gotten the volume part quite figured out yet. Some so far unpublished videos will probably have to come with subtitles.)

Having had very little luck posting videos to Blogger, I'd like to steer those who are interested over to my other accounts. I get videos and pictures up on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

Although I once swore never to go there, I'm a Tweeting Twit at:

https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

 When my first book came out Emily set me up with another account at https://twitter.com/StormChaserbook, but let's face it: The same stuff mostly goes up on both.

There's a similar thing going on at Facebook, where my regular account is at

https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

Personally, I'd rather everyone follow me on my author's page, at

https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter/

 Why? Because as I understand it, it's easier to find what your favorite author is up to that way ... and don't you need someone else to fill in the time between hearing from your favorite author? Gaiman and Martin don't exactly post every day, you know. (By the way, I loved their comedy routines.)
Also, I've been hearing noises that small businesses (which is what authors are) are going to have a harder time promoting from personal FB pages, but we'll see. In any case, I'd very much like to avoid losing track of people who might someday want to read one of my books.

Or--and I hate to say this--you could do nothing. Because let's face it, you'll see the best of the photos we took right here, sooner or later, whether you read this on Blogger, Livejournal, or any of the other places I post to. I kind of like the little videos, but they'll never be nominated for a ... do they have an Internet Video Award?

I just realized that our only big news from vacation was that we bought a car-top carrier for camping gear. It's a nice change, to have no major accidents or illnesses.

Maybe for vacation we should book a hospital room

I expect you won't hear much from me for the next couple of weeks, because right after Labor Day we'll be on "vacation". The quotes are because our vacations in recent years have been of the kind people need a vacation to recover from.

My wife or I--or both--have been either sick or injured on every single vacation we've taken since the moment we met. Two years ago she was sick on vacation when a guy hit our car head on, leading to both of us being injured. In a variant of that, five years ago we were happily vacationing at a state park along the Mississippi River when we found out my father had been rushed to the hospital with cancer. (He's fine now, by the way.)

So I'm not expecting much.

In the run-up to this upcoming vacation my mother was hospitalized, and we got bad medical news about two other relatives, which I can't help thinking was a shot off our bow--a little warning that maybe we should just build a panic room and stay in it for two weeks. But no, we usually go for it; and Emily and I are fond of camping, hiking, and traveling to places where we can camp and hike. The question of what could possibly go wrong easily answers itself.

We also like to climb, as you can see from this photo of Emily at Prophet Rock, in west-central Indiana.

That answer may have come early this year. Maybe it was the hospital chairs, which were about as comfortable as the iron throne made of swords on Game of Thrones. Maybe it's because I've been wearing a knee brace, which could have caused me to lean more heavily on other muscles. Whatever the case, this week I've had the worst back pain since I pulled a lower back muscle three years ago--while on vacation.

It's in my middle back, in the area where I first hurt myself way back in 1983 at a business fire in downtown Albion. We wore heavy steel breathing air tanks back then, and I wore one for way too long, and you can guess the rest. (No, I wasn't on vacation at the time.) Instead of the dull ache I experience almost all the time, this was a sharp pain that refuses to be ignored, kind of like the American election cycle. It hurt so bad that for a few days I couldn't even concentrate on writing.

I could still read. Let's not get silly. (Oh, and about the end of the third Game of Thrones book: What The Living Heck?!?!)

So now I face going into vacation with back pain (oh, and knee pain), which might cut into my hiking time. I know what you're going to say: "Just relax, sit around the campfire with a good book and some music, have a beer ... you know, relax".

I hate beer. More to the point, according to Emily, I suck at relaxing. At the moment I'm thinking road trip, since I can still drive, and there's a lot of road we haven't seen.

On any road trip, there are certain roads you should avoid.

 In the evening I could work on a new story, which to me is relaxing. I also have a book to finish editing, which is not quite so relaxing, but might be if I'm typing on a lounge chair along Lake Superior.

There's also the fourth Game of Thrones book to read ... but man, those gargantuan kill-fests aren't so relaxing. Just the same, Emily and I do want to get away for awhile, kind of an escape from reality thing.

At least, until one of us gets sick.

 

"Nobody asked if *I* liked to climb."

There's No Magic Bullet for This Anniversary

I took a couple of days off for our wedding anniversary this year, having come up with a fairly simple idea, which is all I'm capable of when it comes to events like that. Anniversaries, birthdays, Valentine's Day ... my mind freezes up like a ... frozen ... thing. See, just thinking about it does that.

Now, my wife loves camping, but our anniversary is March 5th. In Indiana that's camping season in the same way the South Pole is a tourist attraction: Sure, you can do it, but you're more than likely going to freeze. But we'd had a very warm February, so I rolled the dice and came up with a plan: We would head south for a short camping trip, maybe somewhere along the Ohio River where it's always at least five or ten degrees warmer than Northern Indiana. It's not exactly green down there yet, which is why I settled on Clifty Falls State Park--a place where a lack of foliage might actually improve the view.

As long as it didn't rain it was a brilliant plan, by which I mean it was brilliant by my standards, by which I mean I didn't come up with a backup plan in case it rained. Then we got measurable snow on two of the first three days of March. The first day we didn't get any snow because of the severe thunderstorm rolling through.

I confess to getting a little nervous at that point.

Our forecast was cooler and partially wet, but hey--that was hundreds of miles from our soon-to-be dream anniversary spot. So I checked the forecast for Madison, Indiana, which is right by Clifty Falls at the opposite end of the state.

Their forecast was exactly the same as ours.

That I didn't see coming. It wouldn't be so cold that we wouldn't be comfortable inside the sleeping bags my mother-in-law gave us for Christmas--but three days stuck inside a tent with a dog, wrapped in a sleeping bag (us, not the dog), just doesn't seem all that dreamy.

So as I write this it's March Third, and I'm desperately trying to come up with a plan B. I even checked on what the anniversary gifts are for a fifth wedding anniversary. The traditional one is wood, and the modern one is silverware.

Well, the wood would come in handy to build a fire. But silverware? Why don't I just give her a new garbage disposal, or a vacuum cleaner? "Isn't it romantic? A gift like this will sweep you off your feet! Get it? Dear? What are you doing with that ax?"

At this point I considered combining the anniversary gift ideas into a "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" themed anniversary, in which we would go out into the forest with wooden stakes and silver bullets to hunt the supernatural. That show figured into how we met, and I believe it's having a 20th anniversary itself, so I thought I had something. Then I realized it would involve taking my once again disappointed wife into an area with no witnesses, then handing her a sharp object and a loaded gun.

Might as well just give her a shovel, too ... but I think hand tools don't come around until the 11th anniversary. I'll let you know how it goes.

If I can.

Our system has crashed

You may have read my earlier Instagram post, which went like this: 

Photos like this should always begin with "no one was seriously injured". It was a very sudden end to our vacation trip, thanks to a young man who was blinded by the evening sun. Now we have a car jammed full of camping stuff at a tow company in Logansport ... We're working out the logistics. Do I need to tell you a story will follow later?

Which is fine, but things change, and I did say "serious" injuries. I have the traditional airbag rash, strained forearm muscle, and a mysterious gash on my right index finger that we just can't figure out. Emily's right foot is bruised and swollen, and we're in the process of getting an x-ray, just in case.

The dog--and the other driver--seem fine.

Camping: By The Light Of The Laptop

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

            My concept of camping is a great example of wanting to have things both ways. I like being away from home for a day or two … but I want to bring home with me.

            When my wife the Girl Scout went camping, she’d take a square of canvas, fifty feet of rope, and a pocket knife. For a week. To her, it’s not really camping if you can get there by car. No, you have to hike, and preferably climb a cliff, to get to the perfect site. Once there, you dig a pit for a toilet and make furniture out of twigs.

            To some people, the best way to camp is to buy several sets of wheels and red flags, then take your house with you as an oversized load. I may not be one of those people, but I’m way closer to it than she is.

            It seemed a compromise was in order.

            Complicating matters is that we now have an 85 pound dog, and he’s not the kind of pet who can be left behind overnight. Well, not unless you’re planning to refurnish.

            We decided to make a test run at Chain O’ Lakes State Park. The advantage is that the park is only six miles from home: If we forgot something, or if I started missing cable TV, we could simply drive back to town.

            Now, I need to point out that we’ve wanted to have what we call writing holidays. I was about a third of the way through the first draft of a novel, and being on a roll I wanted to keep going. Emily, also a writer, understood. It’s a strange thing about writers, that they’d want to take their work with them. Maybe if we were doing it full time we’d feel differently.

            That explanation makes what I said next seem just a little less ridiculous: “We need to get a space with an electrical hookup.”

            “Why?” We had a tent. No air conditioning, no mini-fridge, and battery powered lanterns.

            “Well, so I can use my laptop.”

            She didn’t even blink. My portable computer is getting old enough that the battery no longer holds much of a charge, making the term “portable” questionable. She, meanwhile, took along a notebook and pen—and her cell phone, which has a writing app on it. We also took along a book, a writer’s magazine, and a Kindle with maybe a hundred books in it.

            Because heaven forbid that while relaxing we should, you know … relax.

            Meanwhile, because of the dog, we traded in her pup tent. The irony! We couldn’t leave him chained up outside in an unfamiliar campsite, so we went for a bigger tent. A four man tent? Big enough for the two of us, the dog, and maybe a small bookcase?

            Nah.

            Our new tent sleeps ten people. You can stand up in it. Yao Ming could stand up in it. (He’s a basketball player. I looked it up.) Bae, the dog, took off to explore it, and we didn’t see him for two days. There wasn’t enough room at the campsite for both it and the car, so we parked the car inside.

            And now to stock it.

            Emily had a list. One lantern. A small cooler. Just one sleeping bag, ‘cause it’s summer. A warm dog, just in case it did get cold. And, her one luxury, an inflatable queen sized mattress.

            Incidentally, while queen sized is plenty big enough for two people, it becomes a problem when you add a very determined dog who wants to cuddle.

            My list was, shall we say, more eclectic.

            For one thing, I like lots of light. That’s the big reason why I hate winter so much: the short days. I have … let me count …  nine flashlights and lanterns. I brought ‘em all, and also stocked up enough 

firewood for three hog roasts.

            Emily drew the line when she saw me heading toward the car with two lamps from the living room. “We do not need those.”

            “But … we’ll have electricity!”

            “We have enough light. Now, put them back, then remove the TV from the car.”

            She wouldn’t let me take my writing desk, microwave, chain saw, or toilet. (Granted, there were practical problems involving that last one.) She wouldn’t even let me take a full case of Mountain Dew, just a couple of cans. It was uncivilized.

            Still, when we sat at the picnic table that evening, with the scent of food cooking on the campfire, listening to the sounds of birds while hungry raccoons circled the dog … it was really nice.

            Even if the folks in the double-wide camper next door did look at me strangely when I plugged in the laptop.

Okay, maybe we didn't have a rig like the neighbors ... but we had a great view.