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| The homestead. February 2008. |
"We packed up our camping gear, drove down to Seattle from Vancouver, put all that camping stuff on a plane then camped at Walt Disney World. Yeah, Orlando in Florida. That one."
It might have been easier to have those words come out had it just been me and my wife since it reduces the gear factor to a large backpack. Two people camping after a long plane ride doesn't seem weird. (Mercifully we left all the cooking equipment in Vancouver -- we made use of the Walt Disney World "Dining Plan.") But at the time of the trip we had three kids along for the ride, which exponentially increased the amount of stuff to bring. Extra clothes, shoes, a big tent, sleeping bags, air mattresses... And none of them were really at age where they could handle more than a wheeled suitcase and a "fun size" backpack, which meant Jennifer and I were left to lug everything from place to place.
So, you might be able to imagine us arriving at Fort Wilderness Resort. Haggard from an early departure in Seattle and a 6 hour flight, arriving at our campsite in the dark, hungry, irritable. I'm pretty sure my shirt was torn but at least the cut above my right eye had finally stopped bleeding.
Comparing Fort Wilderness Resort to "real" camping is a bit of a stretch. Camping to me is marked with pit toilets, sharing the lake with sucking leeches, and hour upon hour of driving to finally reach a spot we can start to relax. (The wind-up to get "back to nature" and start "relaxing" seems counter-intuitive because it takes so much frantic energy to get there in the first place.)
The Fort Wilderness Resort is high end camping. (Hell, the word "resort" is right there in the name.) There are nearby laundry facilities, two large pools, hammocks, relatively flat campsites, small lizards, a couple of shops. Very nice! But arriving in the dark after so much travelling, there was really only one thought in my mind: My God, I hate camping.
