Going concerns: Family camping

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.

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