Camping

What drives us to camp?  Is it a cry back to our primal days?  A chance to live as we used to? To absorb nature? Is it the dream of rest and relaxation? Because all these things seem to exist more in either the anticipation or in the reflection of the actual event.  The actuality is full of modern contrivances so that we do not have to live as ‘primitively’ as we might like to think ourselves capable of. In part I might welcome the opportunity to sleep out in the open and live off bush berries for a few days if it seriously cut back on all the cooking & cleaning I had to do!

But, the memories make it worth it…

The Australian bush is beautiful and it was fun to cook on the fire, build sandcastles, collect shells, discover our own ‘Mermaid Cove’, swim with the fish, dive in the surf.  And we saw a lot of wildlife, from crabs to possums, a red-bellied black snake, a very friendly goanna and of course kangaroos and a wallaby.

We slept to the scratching and scrounging of who-knows-what animals, and gum leaves and sticks falling on our tent, in fact it was an area prone to trees falling and we saw one suddenly & entirely collapse only a hundred metres from our campsite.  Which kept me awake at night! In the morning it was noisy!  So many birds just having a party.

I felt absolutely exhausted by the end, cooking & cleaning in makeshift conditions, dragging the kids around the beach and back, but times like these call for extra effort and the memories will always be special.