Despite popular belief amongst my family, I do not hate camping. I am not going camping next week because I have the Orchestra region festival and I’m taking three extremely difficult classes that I don’t want to have to make up work in. So, dearest older brother of mine, PLEASE STOP SPREADING RUMORS TO OUR FAMILY THAT I’M NOT GOING BECAUSE I’VE RANDOMLY DECIDED TO HATE CAMPING. Seriously. Keep it up and I’ll go all caps on you.

Camping is fun except for girls camp (which is fine, by the way. It’s fine that people like it, I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with it… except for that I am). I dislike girls camp because it’s all schedules and curfews and actual bathrooms and a bunch of girls that are fine, I like them, but I’M JUST VERY PARTICULAR ABOUT MY CAMPING, OKAY? I like camping out in the woods where (heaven forbid) you have to find a nice bush or tree when nature calls. I like lazing around all day and not really doing anything unless I have a passing inclination to do something random (such as run up the side of a very steep hill and then throw rocks at things).  I like sitting around with people that I’ve grown up with and make cheesy jokes and laugh at them. I like writing rude things on rocks (seriously, in order to prevent insanity from raging, when we go camping, our family has the “rude rock”, which is basically this huge rock that we’re camping on top of that we write on with other rocks. Whenever we get mad at one of our family members, instead of being grumpy and snappy for the rest of the trip, we just walk over to the rude rock and write something rude [and usually untrue, such as “Emily looks funny”, which is debatable, but… whatever] about the person we are mad at. It may sound really terrible, but it helps relieve pressure and then we all laugh at it and everyone is fine again). I like laying on the ground looking at the stars. I like standing around a campfire with my family until we’re too tired to stand up. I don’t particularly like sleeping in a trailer, but it’s better than a tent.

Another thing about camping, I don’t sleep well, I’m have anxiety related sleep-onset insomnia, so there are only a few places I sleep well at: my house, my grandma’s house… that’s about it. I don’t sleep too badly while we’re camping, but I sleep in the trailer where my parents are also sleeping and we go to the same places every year, so I’m comfortable with it. I’m a wimp when it comes to sleeping, I admit it. I rarely enjoy doing things when I know that I will have to sleep somewhere I’m not used to. Also, I’m deathly afraid of tents. I’m not even joking. Tents do not like me, so girls camp is usually lame. Though, to be fair, there was that one year that we did the whole cabin thing, but that was also very lame.  Also, they made us shower in the middle of the trip and it was very weird and I hated it. We were also not allowed to leave the wood-chip trails and everyone FREAKED OUT if you laid down on the ground. Also, they got us lost on the hike and they drove us down to the bottom of the mountain and then made us hike back up to the top. I don’t mind hiking, but people insisted that we sing and I can’t sing while I’m walking or moving, so it was really hard…

I do not apologize for my rant on camping, though I probably should…