As a kid, I never went camping. The closest I ever came to camping as a child was the time I went to summer camp for a week and slept in a cabin. I didn’t really enjoy the communal living aspect and I became violently ill with food poisoning one night and thew up all over my bunk and the bunk below me. I spent a lot of time in the infirmary. I did not make life-long friends at this camp.
After I married my husband, we went tent camping once in South Dakota. I don’t remember much about this trip except we brought along our little shih-tzu mix and he barked at every noise he heard. It was a busy and noisy campground and we didn’t sleep much.
Now that my kids are older, we have taken them camping a few times. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I tend to be a control freak and I think having to let all of that go is actually quite relaxing for me. I actually prefer the remote campsites, no bathrooms or people right next to you. If you are going to the wilderness having a giant RV next to you running a generator isn’t my idea of fun. So while I actually like camping, I don’t particularly like camgrounds.
I have always wanted to own land. I joke about wanting to be the “landed” gentry.” My mother’s family comes from a long line of farmers and I like to think that I have land lust in my blood. I also have a deep doomsday prepper vein constantly running in the back of my head. The last few months have really brought this to a head and I had to check myself from going Mad Max. But recent events and shortages also showed how by being as prepared (and certainly there were lessons on things to improve upon) I was much less stressed than I might have been otherwise.
I like to consider myuself a minimalist, I like to keep the belongings I have for as long as possible, I try to keep life as simply as possible. I work to live not live to work. Recently, we found some acerage, priced very inexpensively, in the mountains about 3 hours from where we live. We made an offer on sight and closed a few weeks later. The day we signed our documents on-line, we headed to the property with a weed whacker, a chainsaw, tick spray and a dream. We cleared just enough to fit our tent so that the next time we came back, 4 days later over the 4th of July, we had a homebase!
I am going to chronicle our progress here, we have had a blast getting outside and getting very very dirty!