Going concerns: Family camping

I'm not a great camper. But I am a good camper. And I hope that for my family of fledgling nature lovers, that's good enough.

I remember suggesting to Adam, in the depths of a winter's day last year, that we should go camping in the summer. It's the kind of proposal you make when grimy winter landscape has been too much with you, and the thought of jamming one more child into one more snowsuit is an excruciating concept. Still, I harboured the idea in the back of my brain for months, even as the winter grime melted and the snowsuits fell away. At last, I made it known to the family that I intended to see this particular wild imagining through. And we packed up the minivan.

We didn't go far: only two and a half hours outside of the city. The experience was the point, I told them. Not the destination. But the experience could almost immediately have benefited from a built-in DVD player and more snacks. Our van was built on the cusp of the day when DVD players became standard equipment, back when people were getting creative with bungee-corded TV-VCR combinations on the middle console. But we had nothing but a communal Magna Doodle with a scratch down the middle that wouldn't erase.

Just the same, we ventured forth, me folding and unfolding the map so much that the creases wore into tears, Adam steering us into every Tim Horton's drive through along the trucking routes of southern Ontario. Our four kids, for their part, were alternately breathless with excitement at the idea of the camping adventure that lay ahead, and breathless with despair at some presumed injustice dealt them by the guy sitting in the next seat over. "I wish we had a DVD player," a back-seat voice occasionally moaned.

Finally, we were there. We pulled into the camp site, spoke with a guy in a little building about our reservation and got a map to our site, and pulled into our home for the next two days.

The kids were wild to disembark the vehicle. Four-year-old Finn, already embracing the magic of life in the great outdoors, immediately took a pee against our flagship maple. The rest of us tried to put up the tent.

We'd used this tent before, in our family room. It's one of those nifty Canadian Tire specials that springs to life in a flash and requires no inner pole assembly. Within moments, we were ready to go, and the kids were scrambling to claim their "bedrooms" and set up their own personal space. Adam and I broke into a bag of cheesies and watched the drama unfold from a nearby bench. In no time, the novelty of this outdoor domicile had grown thin, and the kids were haranguing us to go swimming. I dug through the knapsacks and was able to produce everyone's swimsuits except my own. No swimming for me, but the plight of being beachbound with a stack of trashy magazines (while Adam lifeguarded a quartet of kids in the waves) was not to be pitied.

Apart from an occasional juvenile whine for a toy left at home, and two emergency trips back onto the highway to visit a nearby Wendy's (Adam and I struggled to master the propane stove we'd borrowed), the next two days unfolded just as I'd imagined they would months before, under cloak of cold and snow. We laughed, we bonded, we frolicked, and all under a great big sky we don't get to see enough of in the city. I truly believe our encounter with the natural world (albeit in the occasional company of a fast-food meal) changed our perspective on things. On the way home, nobody even mentioned the absence of a DVD player.