'Are we raising a generation of nature-phobic kids?'

The best part of camping is finding that one beer in the cooler from the night before and cracking it while making coffee.

 

My son was an Eagle Scout. My daughter was a Girl Scout. My wife was a Girl Scout troop leader. They all love camping and the outdoors -- even winter camping, which I think is just nuts. Let's just say I enjoy it as a once or twice a year thing. Otherwise, give me 24-hour room service please. I see all the wilderness I need looking for my drives.

 

I think I've told this story around here before, but I'm bored, so here goes.

Went "camping" with friends during high school one weekend. On Sunday morning, we woke up and planned to head into the woods for "breakfast." I was quite hungry, so I rummaged around and found a can of beans. Not wanting to be left behind, I threw it on the fire, which was still going from the night (early morning) before. About 10 minutes later, a few minutes into "breakfast," a pretty loud explosion scares the shit out of us. I knew instantly what had happened, but I was the youngest of our group and didn't have seniority to explain myself without an avalanche of (well-deserved) ridicule. Of course, I couldn't avoid that when we returned to the camp site to see beans splattered all over our belongings, including dozens of small, smoldering holes in the nearest sleeping bag.

 

Haven't been camping since the oldest left Cub Scouts a few years back. It didn't suck quite as much as I expected, but I've never given serious thought to doing it again on my own, plus I suspect my creaky body has aged out of the sleeping bag life.

I'm not outdoorsy either, but I enjoy the beach and about once or twice a year I try to spend half a day or so in a kayak or whitewater raft.

 

Does staying at someone's vacation home in the Poconos count as camping?
If so I've got a great story from high school involving four hits of blotters acid, a gas grill and my hair.

 

I could perhaps contribute if we started a running Things That Happened on Acid Thread.

 

That would be a heck of a thread.

 

Think I'll name my fantasy football team BringThe4WayWindowPane

 

But was it high powered?

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”

 

That particular incident involved some pretty good blotter, it was about 250 mics per hit.
for the record, I never used ether recreationally, although after reading that book we all wanted to.

 

“The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station.”