“I don’t camp,” I warned Brian on our first date over ten years ago.  Having met on match.com, I read he was interested in camping.  In the interest of saving time, if this was a deal-breaker for him, I explained my disinterest in camping.   It turned out that it wasn’t a deal-breaker.  He liked camping, but was more interested in SCUBA and sailing.  I loved water and was willing to add both of these things to my repertoire of hobbies. 

Our first trip together was to attend sailing school in the Virgin Islands.  We enrolled in school to learn how to sail on a 42-foot catamaran.  We also scheduled a sleep aboard for the night before school started so we could be ready for action.  Imagine my surprise when the sleep aboard wasn’t on the 42-foot catamaran, but on a 30ish foot monohull!  My response to the situation was something like, “I know I told you,  but I don’t camp.”  Somehow, with the help of a lot of good rum, I survived. 

We moved on from that sailing school experience to charter many other boats and eventually to own a 35-foot Catalina.  Over the five or six years that we owned it, we spent many weeks of vacation and almost every weekend from May-October living on the boat.  In my mind, it was close to camping.  And it was as close as I wanted to be. 

When I agreed to live in a motorhome fulltime, I agreed to live in a motorhome, not a camper, not a trailer, a motor-HOME.  It wasn’t until we were just a few months out from our new lifestyle when we started looking at places to park that this notion of camping reared its head again.  If you stay in a campground, what are you?  Am I camping?  Am I a camper?  After professing that I was not a camper, nor would I ever be a camper, was I suddenly a camper?

Well, I guess if the only qualification for being a camper is living in a campground than you can call me a camper.  I don’t feel like a camper.  I have a house.  It’s just that my house also has wheels.  The only tent that I own is the pop-up screen room that we bought to protect ourselves from the voracious appetites of mosquitoes and biting flies this summer.  I sleep on a king-sized sleep number mattress like many people purchase for their sticks and bricks homes.  I have a bath and a half with running water to flush toilets and wash hands.  These are all things that didn’t exist in the campgrounds of my imagination from my childhood. 

And if campgrounds didn’t have running water for bathrooms, they certainly couldn’t have pools, hot tubs, dog parks, convenience stores, laundry rooms, or other amenities.  Or could they???   I recognize that the way we live would be considered glamping as opposed to camping.  But in any case, maybe glamping/camping isn’t so bad.  And maybe, just maybe, I was always meant to camp.