It shouldn’t surprise regular readers of my weekly missives that this week’s column is about yet another Naughton-Hecker family camping adventure. Such outings are a staple of our clan’s highly successful (and highly entertaining) “character building program”. If our family is lacking in any quality, it is not character (or characters, to be more precise).
It should also not be surprising to read that our most recent camping trip involved a damaged trailer tire, an epic battle with a nest of angry wasps, and a fresh water tank filled with water that could not in any way be described as fresh.
And it probably wouldn’t surprise you to learn that all of those things occurred before we even pulled out of our own driveway.
This year’s Naughton-Hecker Labor Day Weekend Campout took place at Ozark Farms Family Campground nestled cozily between State Highway 72 and a lovely mobile home park in Rolla, Missouri. With the exception of the thunderous exhaust brakes of the region’s many logging trucks, most of the highway’s traffic noise was drowned out by the sound of our pull-behind camper’s air conditioner unit. And the trailer park doubled as the home of a semi-permanent yard sale, which is nice if you find yourself needing slightly-stained baby clothes or a set of table lamps with mismatched shades.
Our camper was filled with bodies for the holiday weekend. Seven humans (including a baby) and two canines. Bethany’s sister’s clan, the Heckers, added another seven humans and one dog to our body count, although their crew was housed in two camping trailers. We’ve heard rumors that some people go camping to escape the chaos of civilization and to find some peace and quiet. We are not those people.
What we do can barely be called “camping”. We do not sleep on the ground or in tents, nor do we dig holes to poop in. Instead, our lodgings are furnished with comfortable beds, full kitchens, restrooms, water heaters, air conditioners, and hi-definition televisions. “Glamping” is a term that combines glamour and camping. “Glamping” could be used to describe our style of camping, but anyone who knows anything about our myriad mishaps and RV misadventures knows that there is nothing glamourous about a Naughton-Hecker campout.
Hail-ravaged RVs, damaged radiators, dead batteries, scalded hands, leaking toilets, twisted awnings, broken air-conditioners, in-operational generators, non-functioning furnaces, destroyed rear-end gears, and noxious sewer gases are but a few of the not-so-glamorous incidents that have plagued our camping trips over the years.
As I mentioned, last weekend’s trip saw its share of adversity, too. As I was getting our camper ready to go, (we haven’t used it since March), a few issues came up. First, I forgot that I had filled our fresh water tank when we last used our camper six months ago. Despite draining the stagnant water, filling the tank with clean water and a little bleach to sanitize everything, and draining it again, I forgot to drain the water heater tank. For the rest of the weekend, the hot water in our camper smelled like a combination of the non-toxic RV antifreeze I also failed to drain completely and rotten eggs. I told the kids, “If you close your eyes and use your imagination, you can almost convince yourself that you’re bathing in a luxurious hot-sulfur spring in some exotic location.” They didn’t buy it.
While I was airing up the trailer’s tires, I noticed a chunk of rubber peeling away from the sidewall of one of the passenger-side tires. Although I was glad to have discovered the issue before having a blowout on the highway, I was nevertheless dismayed that I had to change a tire when I needed to be packing for the trip. My mood was darkening.
Dismay is not the word I would use to describe how my war with the wasps made me feel. Terror. Rage. Abject, white-hot hate. Those words would be more accurate. The wasps timed their attack for precisely the moment we were trying to leave. I was trying to load our dogs into the bed of the truck (equipped with a camper shell with screened windows for fresh air) when a squadron of the winged hell-spawn began their attack. From their nest that was cleverly hidden under the trailer’s tongue which was presently hitched to the truck’s rear bumper, wasp after wasp began hurling themselves toward me and my beautiful face. Luckily, Bethany remembered that she had picked up a bottle of wasp spray at the grocery store a few days earlier. Ten minutes and at least a dozen dead or dying wasps later, I emerged victorious from the battle. It was a Labor Day Weekend miracle that I somehow managed to avoid getting stung a single time.
As always, the positives of getting everyone together for a fun-filled family campout far-outweighed the negatives. Breakfast cooked over an open fire by my brother-in-law Doug, entertainment provided by Bethany and her identical twin goofball Charla, and the sound of four generations of laughter (from Great Grandma Glee all the way down to Baby Freya).
It was a miraculous Labor Day Weekend indeed.
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