Ah, camping...

     I always enjoyed camping, actually. Which is to say I can look back now with some fondness at the times Mom and Dad would load us all up into that 1972 VW van--222 BEK, I can still remember, was the license plate number--and trundle us off to various parts of the continental U.S.

     We drove at least once from our little corner of the southern California coast to Mom's hometown of Earlville, Illinois in that van, got the rear wheel stuck in sand while camping in Death Valley and were dug out by a group of bikers camping nearby, all caught strep throat from huddling together inside it during one frozen night at the ghost town of Bodie, and burned through three complete engines before Dad sold the van to some kid. Ah, camping...

     So I guess the whole camping experience for me falls into the someday, we'll look back on this and laugh category. But, as Tom Eaton points out in his seminal reference work Otis G. Firefly's Phantasmagoric Almanac and Calendar (Scholastic Books, 1974), "loud continuous manic laughter could prove unsettling to bystanders." So I'll stop now.