Why I got into camping

Happy New Year everyone! I was going to make a post on what I made for New Year’s Eve, but I just made a bunch of appetizers and we ate those for dinner/snacks throughout the night. I made buffalo chicken dip, little wieners wrapped in croissants, bacon wrapped water chestnuts, cocktail meatballs, and a cookie cake.

I wanted to tell you why I got into camping. Most of my childhood memories are from my Pappy taking all of us kids camping. He had a travel trailer that was parked at a campground near Keystone Lake in PA. He would take us kids up for a long weekend and I just remember having so much fun either sitting around the campfire, playing at the playground, walking to the lake to swim, and even on rainy days, I would sit in the dinette and watch him play solitaire with his deck of cards. He also at one point had a class A motorhome and I remember him taking us to I think South Carolina, I do not remember as I was very young. Driving in a motorhome as a child was just the coolest thing. Camping was just peaceful and I loved it.

My love of camping stayed with me into my teenage years and my friends at the time would go tent camping and when I met Brian, we would go tent camping every once and a while. The kids never really seemed to get into tent camping (I think they more liked the camping food then actual camping). We then got to the point where we tent camped and the air mattress just was not cutting it anymore. So we bought our first camper, an a-frame pop up camper! We bought it at the end of camping season of 2019, that did not stop us from taking our first trip in the cold! We went to Linesville campground and had a waterfront site.

As you can see it was very small and I broke my back (not literately) washing dishes. It was cramped with 2 adults and 2 dogs, especially on rainy trips. We needed something bigger and ended up getting the 33 foot travel trailer we have now.

I’m writing about this through tears. We lost Pappy on January 1, 2024. I got to see him when we were back in PA in November and I video chatted with him on Christmas Eve. He was 93 years old. I remember the last time I camped with him was in 2012 and he was still chopping firewood then! The kids were with us and he loved that I brought my family to camp with him. I think he was very excited to see Brian and I buy our travel trailer. He let us park it in his driveway until we left to full-time in it. I’m glad that he got to see our travel trailer and hope he knew that it would not have happened without him.

Hug and tell your family members that you love them because you never know when the last goodbye will be.

~Happy Travels!