For those of you who are familiar with the fact that I love staying in hostels when I travel, it may come as no surprise that I’m rather old school when it comes to camping.

I am strictly a tent-and-air-mattress type of guy. No fancy trailers for me. Not even tent trailers. In fact, I’m still on the fence when it comes to those new fangled “pop up” tents. You know, the ones where you don’t even need instructions to set it up. You just shake it and poof, it pops up by itself.

My tent is old school. I’ve had it for years. It’s one of those tents where you need the instructions to figure out where all the poles go. Of course, when it comes to roughing it, I do have my limits. I always camp on a site with electricity and I always bring my electric kettle which is one of the greatest inventions anyone has ever dreamed up.

I also have an air mattress that comes with its own pump built right in. No more foot pump for me. And I bring a coffee machine. A percolator is too much of a hassle.
But those are the only luxuries I afford myself.

Over the last few years, glamping has become all the rage among people who want to spend some time in the great outdoors without giving up all the luxuries of home. In many cases glamping accommodations come with running water, including a hot shower and semi-modern toilet facilities.

I am not a glamper. Glamping takes all the fun and adventure out of camping. It’s not camping unless you have to try and find your way to the nearest lavatory with a flash light, or take a bath in the lake every morning.

That said, I do compromise when I go camping with my daughter. Our favourite spot is Presqu’ile Provincial Park near Brighton. And our favourite campground in the park is the High Bluff Campground which has terrific washroom facilities in-cluding showers with hot water.

Maggie and I have been tenting together ever since I took on a camping trip to Niagara Falls when she was three years old.

When she was still a youngster, we went down east a couple of times and the Outer Bank Islands in North Carolina.

My own love of camping comes from my youth when mom and dad used to take us to Cavendish, P.E.I. every summer. I used to spend hour upon hour exploring the nearby sand dunes and frolicking in the ocean. I loved to eat the fried eggs and bacon Dad would make on the old Coleman stove and toasted marshmallows and Jiffy Pop popcorn every night.

When the kids got a bit older, one of the first places I took them was Prince Edward Island and the Cavendish campground in Cavendish National Park.

I also used to take them to Algonquin Park for a weekend every fall, where we would camp in the Achray campground and go hiking in the forest, or paddle across Grand Lake. One time, Maggie and I got caught in a storm on the way back across the lake. Maggie was too young to help paddle and I almost had a coronary trying to paddle against the wind. What should have taken 20 minutes took nearly an hour. Ahhhh, the memories.

Another time when Maggie and I went to the Outer Bank Islands, our camping trip got interrupted by a hurricane.

In my defence, I don’t follow the new at all when I’m camping and the state campground we stopped at operated on the honour system. There was no full time and no camp office. There also wasn’t many people there, which should have been my first clue. In fact, we were the only people there.

I remember waking up in the middle of the night by the roof of the tent slapping me in the face. I was sleeping on an air mattress and when I put my hand down on the floor of the tent, it was immediately submerged in four inches of water. I woke up Maggie, who was seven or eight at the time. Told here to get in the car and we drove 18 hours straight back to Ottawa without stopping except for food and gas.

When we got home, I turned on the news to see that a hurricane had just made landfall about 30 miles from where we camping the night before.

For the past few years, we’ve been sticking to Presqu’ile. For one thing, you don’t have to worry about your vacation being interrupted by a random hurricane, and for another, it’s close enough to Prince Edward County so that you can take a day trip to the local wineries, or a decent restaurant, if the weather turns nasty. Presqu’ile also has a decent beach and lots of hiking trails.

So this weekend, Maggie and I will be packing the car and setting off for another father-daughter camping trip and the experi-ences and memories we’ll create.

(If you wish to comment on this or any other View Point column please write to Fred Sherwin at fsherwin@orleansstar.ca)