I've Come to Enjoy our Time Together

Pretty standard day here in south Holland. Rain, clouds, etc. Unfortunately this may preclude a trip to the beach this weekend. I think that later on today I will make a trip over to the local "outdoor" retailer and drool over all of the fancy gear. I really love technically advanced camping gear. Perhaps this is because I've always enjoyed camping ever since I was a child. Some of my earliest memories were of road trips in my grandparents' RV. It wasn't the biggest on the road but it was pretty comfortable for two adults and two young kids. Things got a little more crowded when my parents came with, During those times my sister actually slept in the bathtub (which, come to think of it, explains a lot). Most of our trips were within a couple hundred miles of home with the occassional longer journey. I remember that we went to Canada at least once every summer. My favorite part of these trips was the visit to the Winnepeg airport to watch the planes taxi and take off. I was fascinated by airplanes and my grandparents liked to cultivate our dreams.
I never did end up becoming a pilot, but all the traveling we did all those years, all the places we visited, and the things we saw really nurtured my wuderlust. Perhaps that is why I've always felt restless after living in one place for too long, there's just too many places to see.
Back to my point. After graduating from "camping" in the "camper" I learned the joys of sleeping in tents. When my mother remarried it was to an avid bass fisherman which ment lots of camping as we went from tournament to tournament. The best was finally having my own tent. Unfortunately these were "K-mart specials" that often leaked when it rained and my Star Wars sleeping bag, while tres cool, didn't always do a bang up job of keeping me warm and dry. Hence the fascination with gear. By college my woefully underequipped outings blossomed into "gear envy." I seemed to never have the stuff that fit the bill. My friends cooked on portable gas stoves while sitting in collapsable camp chairs and slept in down bags uder spacious dome-tents while I sat on the ground, ate what they shared with me and shivered the night away in my hand-me-down tent and bag.
All of this began to change when I planned to leave for Europe and purchased my first internal frame backpack. That "no-name" pack has been with me for over a decade and was truely my first forray into the world of suitable camping gear. I still have gear envy from time to time. In fact, it was pretty severe when I lived in Colorado, a place where in some circles one's status as a human being is judged by the type of outdoor equipment one owns. Heaven forbid you should be one of the pariahs who doesn't have a membership at REI!!!
Even today I am far from what I would consider to be adequately eqipped, but I am now much more savvy and I have just enough gear that when night falls I sleep like a baby.