It was going to be our last canoe trip before moving to the US; to say that we were looking forward to it would be a gross understatement. We loved those trips. Sure, they were hard work – lugging two small children and camping gear for four into backwoods lakes in a canoe – but they were an escape. They were islands of quiet in the vast, churningly busy weeks of the ocean that was the craziest summer of our shared lives. They were our getaway, our holiday, our us time. And we’d gotten really, really good at them.
This good.
When we started out on our first trip, we were still figuring things out. We packed too much food and not enough beverage, too much sunscreen and not enough bug repellent, too much bear spray and not enough chipmunk-be-gone. We struggled with solar chargers for our gadgets and failed to figure out how to use the GoPro. We did not yet understand that beef jerky was a food. But by our last trip, we had things down to a science. We sorted out the charger issue (trick: get a really good charger and charge it in advance) and figured out how to ward off chipmunks. We’d worked out the exact amount of food we needed and had figured out how to hack a portable, fully stocked bar (with ICE). We understood about beef jerky. We had it down. And this last trip? Was going to be a model of backcountry camping ninja efficiency.
But then the days got away from us. There was too much stuff to do – little things, like sorting out immigration and relocation and figuring out how to move our entire household to New York City over the course of just a few weeks – and we just couldn’t do it. So that last weekend, we ended up staying home – the home we’d soon be leaving – with leasing forms and packing boxes, dreaming of the lake and of how that would have been the Canadian camping weekend to end all Canadian camping weekends.
And so in honor of that last, unfulfilled Canadian camping weekend, I thought that I would list the things that we would have done, which basically amounts to a list of the 10 Most Important Lessons for Hardcore Family Camping for Comfort Addicts that we mastered this summer:
1) You CAN bring your iPhone. And you can use it. Just don’t use it for social networking or checking email. Give yourself a break from being connected and just use it for taking photos and video and reading O, The Oprah Magazine
2) But if you must use it to make the occasional posting to Facebook, do what my husband did and maximize your 3G access by lashing your phone to a very tall log and hoisting it up in the air (hit ‘post’ before you lift the log. The log will not know to do this for you.) Or do as I did and paddle yourself out into the middle of the lake, where the 3G reception is always better, and the kids won’t see you with the phone and shriek at you about wanting to watch Thomas videos.
3) Conserve your phone battery by force-quitting all apps and powering off the phone at night and for at least a few hours during the day. I was able to get 3 days of battery life out of my iPhone doing this. Then we discovered the world of high-end solar chargers, and the trick of charging them in advance of the trip, and that made all the difference.
4) It seems like just one more thing to lug across a portage – and believe me, when your trip includes two portages and multiple beaver dam crossings, the more you have to carry, the more miserable you are – but trust when I say that lugging a block of ice is totally worth it. Chipped ice makes all the difference to filtered water, and to a warm tetra-pak of Pinot Grigio, to say nothing of its ability to chill beer and keep chocolate from melting. (A block of ice, by the way, lasts almost a full day longer than a bag of cubes. Heavier, yes, but you will be grateful for that extra day. Keep it in the shade in an insulated bag with a wet towel over it.)
5) Bring the best sleeping bags that you can afford. Even if it’s super warm into the evening, at some point in the night, you will get cold, and you will hate it. Emilia and I both had Selk’bags
Selk’bag: comfy AND adorable.
6) Starbucks instant coffee is your friend. You can also get instant machiatto and latte mixes, and these are much more drinkable than you’d think.
7) Chipmunks like machiatto mix. Hide your machiatto mix.
8) Raccoons like chocolate bars. Hide your chocolate bars.
9) Master your gadgets before a trip. We had no idea how to use our GoPro before our first trip and we missed getting awesome footage of Emilia falling into the lake while fishing because I was holding down the wrong button. That was a $10,000 winner on America’s Funniest Home Videos right there.
10) Just do it. You just need a canoe (you can rent them) and a tent and a map and some food and bug spray. It’s a bit of work, but it’s so worth it. Two days of being miles and miles away from civilization feels like an age, and it’s restorative, really, truly, it is.
And you get the best pictures.
Originally posted approximately a thousand years ago; repurposed for now, because camping is good and you should do more of it.
This post is part of The Whole Family Happiness Project, in partnership with Social Currents and the Low Carbon Economy Narrative Initiative. The Whole Family Happiness Project poses the question, “What is the connection between our individual purpose, our family happiness, and the happiness of the world around us?”
To learn more or get involved, visit Whole Family Happiness on Facebook. #wholefamilyhappiness
