I love camping, and crave it every summer. Though I don’t go out of my way to camp alone—it’s better with other people.
I grew up technically staying at campgrounds a lot throughout my childhood, and some of those places were really nice or gave me great memories, like smell of the wilderness with a fire going.
When I was a kid, I’d only ever sleep in the tent a few times, and that was whenever it was out. Otherwise, we had an RV (and that’s a whole other story). But I came to love camping so much that I always crave for the real camping material lol
What we usually do that makes it worthwhile is roast hot dogs until they’re practically burned and eat them (either with or without a bun, with ketchup and mustard) and it tastes so good! We’ll also make S’mores because you can’t do camping without it lol We’ll also either tell scary stories around this time, or listen to a Lore podcast while staring at the fire, or sometimes we’ll do that while in the tent with all the lights off. Makes it spooky.
We’ll typically go to places without fun activities just because it’s not always available to us. For example, when we used to live in California, whenever we wanted to “get away” from our parents and life, we would take the tent and some chairs to the KOA down the road, even though it didn’t have any big trees and grassy areas (the ground was really hard). But we typically went there since they had a pool that was opened year round, which was cool. Other times when we wanted actual wildlife, we would go a little further away to a campground near a lake with lots of trees and stuff.
I’ve only actually been “real camping” once where there was no campground, but was in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a forest, and that was last July where we went to Colorado to see my sister’s now ex-boyfriend and ex-friends. They’re big on hunting, and would go to this specific area to not only hunt but camp. You were able to see the stars perfectly, and hear all kinds of animal sounds. We actually got scared at one point because it sounded like coyotes were really close to us. But it was really beautiful out there.
But honestly, as much as I love doing outdoorsy stuff, I do hate the bugs. They’re the worst part of it. That and if I have to walk anywhere because I loathe walking, and many other exercises. 