Getting Ready for Camping

We are going camping. We have camped several times in the distant past but we decided it wasn't our cup of tea. My own bed, with clean sheets and all the windows open, with the smell of smoke from our cookout coming in the windows captures for me all the best features of a camping trip. When we travel I am a "yes I do want you to change my sheets and give me clean towels every day!" kind of girl (who do those people think they are fooling? saving the environment? right. saving their almighty dollars, but not they are charging a hundred dollars a night for a room!) . Many years ago, we sold all our camping equipment. Any camping friends we had have all upgraded to moving homes with kitchens and bathrooms that need regular cleaning- I could live the rest of my life without ever entering the one kitchen I have, I certainly do not want another.
But, like childbirth and long airplane flights, after enough time, you forget, and when someone says, 'let's do that again', you agree. So when our church announced a group camping trip, I remembered how often Andy had asked to go camping and I signed us up.
Today we told the children we would be going camping in 3 weeks and we were going to see the campground first. On the way there I heard Andy say to Ric, "I hope they don't have ghosts". I knew that telling them there are no ghosts would only provoke an argument, as all their knowledge about camping comes from Disney's Sing Along Camp Songs where they learned everything they know about ghosts. And, although I recently heard Nellie telling Andy that Mickey Mouse -who says there are ghosts -is not real, he didn't believe her because he had his picture taken with him. This, in a family that doesn't do Santa or the toothfairy because we do not want our children to be confused about what is real and what is not...sigh...So , I told them there are no ghosts in North Carolina and aren't we blessed to live in this beautiful state.
While we were at the campground the kids decided to try out the creek. Later in the day I found a great deal on a tent and sleeping bags for the kids, which provided an hour giggling while they tried them on rightsideup and upsidedown. It is entirely possible that the preparation might be alot more fun than the actual event. More on that later. C