Camping

When I was little, we went on road trips every year.  The eight of us (nine counting my aunt who always came) piled into our fifteen passenger van and off we went on an adventure planned out by my mom, who was and is the queen of trips.  Seriously, if ever I need a trip planned, I'm calling her.  She knows every trick in the book.  Now because there were nine of us, we camped a lot.  We never camped on our way to places, no we always got motels for that.  But a lot of the time our destination would be a national park or another beautiful camping area.  There were usually two tents, one for my parents and the boys, and the other (the big house as we called it) for the four of us girls and our aunt.  We've had any number of experiences while camping, from freezing so much in the middle of the summer that we slept in a big pile in the middle of the tent with beach towels around our heads to keep warm to getting flooded out of  the tent due to massive rainstorms to being so hot that we slept outside of our sleeping bags and with as little clothing as possible while still remaining decent.  One of my favorite camping memories though happened in a crowded campground when I was about 13. My aunt uncle and cousins were camping with us in like Zion National Park or somewhere, and we were settling down to go to sleep.  My cousin Tara is a notorious chatterbox, who basically would talk herself to sleep, and we had finally gotten her to shut up and go to sleep.  The rest of us were settling in, waiting for the blissful embrace of sleep after a hard day of fun in the sun, when suddenly, from a different campsite, we heard the British tones of a Harry Potter audio book.  Now this was not at like 8:30 when a bedtime story would be appropriate, no this was at like 10:30, 11, when the majority of the campers in the area were going to sleep!  And this person, or people, were BLARING Harry Potter.  I believe it was Chamber of Secrets.  All of a sudden, Tara sits back up, completely asleep, and proceeds to try to have a conversation with the audio book.  It was the funniest thing I had ever heard in my entire life.  I miss camping.  I should see if I can get some people to go this summer!