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In Memoriam Comment by Robert Burris on October 24, 2013 at 10:29

Every year the girls and I would go camping in a tent, when school would let out. We would fish and do some outdoor exploring. We would go every year, starting when they were about 7 or 8 years old and continuing until after high school.

  We would build a camp fire and cook on it. Fish and eat our catch. We would shoot a pellet gun for practice. I taught them Woodscraft, also.

   It was a lot of fun but we had to stop because of my disabilities. We may start again, one day, when they have husbands and they can do the hard work. I'll teach them the Outdoor tricks.

   Oh, before I end this, I thought I'd tell ya'll the name of our little camping trip. The girls called it the "Typsy Tent Camping Trip". It seems our first year trip, we had packed the wrong poles for the tent and it leaned real bad to one side.

Comment by Howard P Reynolds on October 23, 2013 at 21:35

Good stories guys.  I didn't do much camping as a kid - weekend surf fishing in Delaware; overnights on the beach with my dad and younger brother.  But, I lived pretty much surrounded by nature on 10,000 acres where I was a cowboy from 13 to 18.

Comment by Ken Spielvogel on October 23, 2013 at 20:00

Great stories all.  When our kids were growing up we camped a lot in many different states East and West. We started out in a tent, then a pop up Apache, then a van. We made memories to last forever.

Comment by Tobias Gibson on October 23, 2013 at 19:10

Robert, there is no doubt the cold gets in your bones more as you get older but, at least for me, I can still tolerate it better than the heat and the humidity.   The plus side of camping in the cooler weather is fewer bugs to deal with.  While I can deal with them, I'm not a big fan of mosquitoes and ticks.

The worst thing about winter camping is crawling out of a warm sleeping bag and getting a camp fire started to get warmed up.  That is where a good camp stove comes in handy.  If you can keep your hands and feet warm, everything else falls into place.

When we used an open camp fire for the primary heat source we would some times run a fire watch and keep the fire going day and night as long as someone was in camp. As I said, we were all in ROTC. This made us soldier wannabe geeks so we pretty much ran things like a field exercise.

The ROTC program required us to go to the field twice a year for an overnight field exercise. Once in the early fall and a second time in the late spring. (4 days total) 

About 25-30 of decided to form a club and we went out  8 times a year, plus the two mandatory times. (Four times for  5 days and 4 nights and four  times for 2 days and 2 nights) We spent Winter, Spring and Summer Breaks playing Army and/or camping / doing survival training instead of going to Palm Springs and getting laid.  Go figure!

About half of the time  we had a cadre member (active duty Army Officer) with us.  These were the times we could work on army tactics such as various types of patrolling. The other times were supposedly "social events" which did not require cadre .  These were the times we would go canoeing, rafting or just go camping.  It was also  on these times that we would  plan a land navigation /escape and evasion exercise that would cover about 20 kilometers or so and go from Dusk to Dawn.

Over a three night period you would be either Hunter, hunted, or Referee.   We'd form groups of two or three.   The group that was being hunted would need to move to one or two specified objectives and leave a marker (normally a milk jug)  and then return to base camp without being caught.  The hunters only knew the boundaries but not the objectives.  The referees and the hunted knew the objectives.  The hunted got a 30 minute head start.  The hunters needed to capture the hunted before reaching the objective and/or at least 500 meters from the base camp. Like I said, we played Hide and Seek!

I guess I was becoming a prepper before we were being called preppers!

(Below) Me playing Hide and Seek in College (Age 18)

In Memoriam Comment by Robert Burris on October 23, 2013 at 17:38

Hey, great story, Tobias.  The cold did not bother me that much, when I was young....lol

Comment by Tobias Gibson on October 23, 2013 at 11:08

When I was a yungin  me and some other friends would  go up to Devil's Lake Wisconsin in first weeks of January for a three day week-end.  That was done in tents. It was cold enough that you could walk across the lake. 

The first thing we'd need to do was clear the snow from the camp site. As we were all in ROTC, we'd often check out pup-tents and army sleeping bags for the trip.  We'd also bring some 1/2 inch line and do some off-the-grid rappelling.  Depending on how many of us went, we would also run an impromptu Escape & Evasion course (okay we played hide and seek - but you seriously didn't want to get caught!)

We never got around to ice fishing but we did on occasion barter with some of ice fishers for some of their catch. (you'd be surprised how much fish you can get for a pint of cheap whiskey in Wisconsin!)

In Memoriam Comment by Robert Burris on October 23, 2013 at 9:52

Well camping is camping. It's getting away from the everyday routine and enjoying the Outdoors. New spots or old. Please lets hear some stories. Where ya'll go, what ya'll do, what ya'll eat, do you hunt, fish or hike on these trips.

  I'm gonna take a few pictures of some of our cabins and post them.

Comment by Billy Oneale on October 22, 2013 at 22:21

RV camping most of the time. It used to be in tents.

Featured Comment by Charles Sample on October 22, 2013 at 20:15

We don't go camping.  My wife considers it roughing it when room service is late! LOL

Comment by Tobias Gibson on October 22, 2013 at 20:02

Regrettably all my camping stories are from days of old.  I'm also a cabin camper  these days.  Not by choice but by marriage.

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