I'm glad I have persisted through Mark Twain's "Roughing It." The trick is to just skip the 'humorous tales'. He was camped near Lake Tahoe with some fellow travelers:
This is all so strange, considering the objective conditions of camping. I don't mean physical discomfort. I mean overcrowding, noise, hosts/volunteers who are Barney Fife wannabees, music, generators, car doors slamming all night, late arrivers, reservations, fees, anti-dog rules, rules, and more rules!
How do you explain this?: it was a perfect morning here. I asked a camper if there was any way it could be more perfect. He said, "Well yea, I could have slept-in an hour later." I was appalled.
I didn't ask him what I was thinking: considering all the time you spent driving here and back, and all the time spent packing and unpacking, why didn't you just stay home and sleep-in many hours later, if sleeping-in is your idea of the perfect weekend?
But here I am getting close to my annual sermon about 'Taking a stay-cation this year instead of a camping vacation.'
It was a hard, wearing, toilsome journey, but it had its bright side; for after each day was done and our wolfish hunger appeased with a hot supper of fried bacon, bread, molasses and black coffee, the pipe-smoking, song- singing and yarn-spinning around the evening camp-fire in the still solitudes of the desert was a happy, care-free sort of recreation that seemed the very summit and culmination of earthly luxury. It is a kind of life that has a potent charm for all men, whether city or country-bred. We are descended from desert-lounging Arabs, and countless ages of growth toward perfect civilization have failed to root out of us the nomadic instinct. We all confess to a gratified thrill at the thought of “camping out.”It is quite a mystery, this strange popularity of "camping out." A couple generations after Twain wrote, a tribe of celebrity campers formed around Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone.
This is all so strange, considering the objective conditions of camping. I don't mean physical discomfort. I mean overcrowding, noise, hosts/volunteers who are Barney Fife wannabees, music, generators, car doors slamming all night, late arrivers, reservations, fees, anti-dog rules, rules, and more rules!
How do you explain this?: it was a perfect morning here. I asked a camper if there was any way it could be more perfect. He said, "Well yea, I could have slept-in an hour later." I was appalled.
I didn't ask him what I was thinking: considering all the time you spent driving here and back, and all the time spent packing and unpacking, why didn't you just stay home and sleep-in many hours later, if sleeping-in is your idea of the perfect weekend?
But here I am getting close to my annual sermon about 'Taking a stay-cation this year instead of a camping vacation.'
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