Camping. The quintessential family vacation. Let’s all leave our climate controlled homes, with our modern day conveniences that we’ve worked hard to acquire, and sleep outside where the only thing that protects you from an animal attack is your husband’s snores and a thin rayon tent.

Both my husband and I grew up camping. In my family’s case, it was a relatively cheap way to have a vacation. And by vacation, I mean see more battlegrounds. My history buff dad took the family to nearly every battleground on the east coast. There was also the time we camped at the same campground my dad had camped with his boy scout group as a child. I’m sure that was near a battleground too.

My husband’s family would go camping just to sleep in the woods and hike.  That’s why we go, back to the campground my husband grew up going to.  To sleep in the woods and hike.  I don’t want to talk about how close our own house is to the woods.  Our backyard.  Our backyard is the woods.

As the ever accommodating wife I am, I again agreed to camping this past weekend.  It turned out to be one of our more successful trips.  Weather was good, hiking was good, food was good.  Kids were surprisingly great.  But all camping trips have their fails.

Where we failed at camping

Paper towels.  That seems like it should have been a given.  Who goes camping without paper towels?  This dirty-fingered family.  Really a rookie mistake.  We should know better.

Leaving the marshmallows out.  Not only did my husband get woken up by the raccoon brawl that commenced, but a raccoon brawl commenced over marshmallows, leaving us with none for the second night.

Not replacing the leaky air mattress.  Apparently our last few times camping, my husband got the leaky air mattress and never did anything about it.  This time, I got it.  And, to top it off, while helping my son get dressed, he accidentally sliced the inside of my nose with his fingernail.  So there I sat, on the deflated air mattress, blood running out of my nose and no paper towels to help catch/stop the bleeding.

On the plus side, we didn’t visit a single battleground.