I have only once been camping in my entire life (when I was 30, skinny and childless), so when my friend Rose asked if we wanted to go camping for the long weekend I thought Hey, I’m all for new adventures. Besides, I knew the kids would love it!
Beaverlac has intermittent (warm) water and no electricity for the camp sites, but not even knowing that deterred me. I was determined to have a great time. The most bizarre thing was that I felt like the last person on earth that had ever heard of the place. Absolutely everyone I spoke to either knew about it or had camped there to varying degrees of success.
So, armed with a tent, a gazebo, a coleman, 2 camping chairs, many bottles of wine and a big blanket for the kids to sit on we hit the road on Saturday morning (after a swimming costume crisis which called for a hasty stop at Woolworths)
I learnt some really important lessons this weekend:
- Dirty feet are inevitable
- There will be sand.
- The sand will get into absolutely everything
- Get a good ground sheet
- Relax and let the kids play
- Blow-up mattresses suck, we’ll be replacing those with other mattresses as soon as we can. I don’t want to shout at children to not jump on mattresses the whole time, they are also there to have fun.
- Invest in a trailer. It’s easy to leave everything in there and better on the back to get stuff in and out.
- And lastly: even though they say you can drink the tap water, don’t.
I only managed to read Cat’s post on camping this morning, go and have a look at what she says, she has some great pointers!
We all had a great time and I’m definitely doing it again, very soon!
Edit to add: I compltelely forgot to add! There was NO cellphone signal. Nothing, niks, nada. Every time I would reach for my phone to tweet something I would realise I couldn’t. Did me the world of good!
Here some pics of the trip:
