Five wheels on my wagon…

It is the Easter weekend and our good friends and their two young boys – for such there be – have loaded up everything including the kitchen sink and headed up island to Nanaimo for a few days camping.

Now – at the risk of sounding like a broken record – ‘when I were a nipper, camping weren’t like this!’ Camping for us meant hefting a heavy rucksack loaded with everything one could possibly need, including the tent (invariably a tiny two ‘man’ job) and all the accoutrements. It meant rain that seeped into your clothing through every conceivable opening (not to mention into the tent at night) – sleeping (if that were possible) on the hard stony ground with only a groundsheet for protection – and heavy, cold, soggy hiking boots that one had to squeeze one’s swollen feet into in the morning.

I do recall one experimental ‘lightweight’ camping trip that I rashly undertook with an overly enthusiastic friend of mine one summer – for which we decided to forgo the tent. We were interested in the then recently available polythene survival bags. We figured that all we needed was one such to keep us warm, and a shared sheet sleeping bag to keep the polythene from our skin. We slept – if that is the word – under another sheet of polythene stretched between two bikes (decorated as I recall by the luminous – and probably toxic – contents of a festival ‘glo-stick’. Well – it was the early 70s!). You can probably guess how the adventure turned out. We both perspired like crazy for the first hour and then – when the temperature dropped – we froze! We were up and about in the middle of the night – teeth chattering castanet-style – trying to cook a ourselves hot breakfast. So much for that experiment!

Canadians do things differently. Camping this side of the ocean invariably involves the Recreational Vehicle – the RV! For the Brits the closest equivalent would be the almost universally loathed caravan, but it really isn’t the same thing at all. For a start some RVs – once fully expanded – are the size of a small apartment. For another, whether the Canadian roads are just bigger (which they are) or the RVs are more suitably powered (which they also are), one just doesn’t see the sort of traffic queues behind crawling vacation homes-from-home that so blight the English A roads in the summer months.

Another alien concept to the average Englishman (if there be such a beast) is the Fifth Wheel. As we don’t really do pickups at all the notion of a large camping trailer hooked onto the back of a truck seems a strange idea. In fact it makes a huge amount of sense both in terms of utilising the existing powerplant – which can also still be used as a separate vehicle – and making the best use of the extra space over the bed of the truck.

Either way, camping – as practiced by the Canadian – is something totally outside the experience of most of us in the UK. Having watched our dear friends packing to go to Nanaimo, however, (and with two small boys that is a non-trivial operation!) I am still not persuaded that I should be joining in the fun, though Kickass Canada Girl naturally considers me something of a wuss for taking that view.

I think boating is more my line!