Camp: An Introduction

Camp. The word itself is enough to send shivers down my spine and make me run to the bathroom to tell my shower and toilet how much I love and appreciate them… shortly followed by curling into a ball in my bed and chanting magic incantations to try calm me down and ward off all the horrible memories of sleeping outside with bugs crawling over my face, and especially the dreaded “Doug the spade.”

But no amount of chanting or crying or screaming could have prepared me for the horror that was last week.

I, Amy Leigh Bouwer, the person who would literally rather stay in bed with a book for years on end than walk outside, went on a camp. Don’t even laugh. I mean, really, we’re talking about the girl who will not go into her bathroom for weeks on end if there happens to be a rain spider on the OUTSIDE of the window. I know. I still can’t quite believe it myself. But I did it. And I’m alive (surprisingly enough.)

But I’m not talking about those mandatory school camps that my school sends us on once a year to teach us “team-building” (i.e. arguing over how to do things that you will NEVER EVER need in real life) and “an appreciation for nature” (i.e. sleeping in a dormitory with cockroaches and mice and who-knows-what-else, then hiking for like an hour). No no, dear, inexperienced children. I am talking about full-on, hiking through the middle of nowhere with all your belongings in a backpack, then sleeping in a tent for four nights. And by hiking I mean walking over an average of about four mountains a day. And by backpack I mean something that holds your clothes, food, cooking equipment, toiletries, sleeping bag, shelter (tent) – basically everything you need to survive – and weighs an average of about 20 kg. And by the middle of nowhere, I mean YOU LITERALLY COULD NOT SEE ANOTHER PERSON/HOUSE/TELEPHONE WIRE/CELLPHONE/TV/BED/SHOWER/TOILET FOR THE WHOLE TIME. Fun.

So basically for the next couple of days / weeks / years (however long it takes me to type out all of my experiences) I will be retelling the horror story that was my camping trip in the most accurate and possibly entertaining way I can manage without forcing myself to relive it all over again. Really. It was that bad.