I've never been a big person for going camping. I love the outdoors, I don't mind using sleeping bags, and I quite like going out for walks. I think that it has to do with sleeping in a tent. Wait there a second, I have no problems sleeping in a tent, I think I'm traumatised.
Alright, maybe it's not that I don't like camping but I do like my creature comforts. I like waking up in a bed in the morning. So I'll phrase this differently, I'm not a big fan of camping.
When I was a child I was in the cubs (not the baseball team but the cub scouts), and every summer we went on weekends away with other groups. On my first trip (I was nine at the time) it was a mixed camp with brownie groups.
It was easy to remember which tent I was in, as it was the third from the end of the line of tents. So after a long day out I was extremely tired by the evening (We were meant to watch a film but I fell asleep before it even started), so was taken to bed early.
The adult taking me back to my tent wasn't from my group, so asked me which tent I was in. I replied that it was the third one from the end. Little did I know that a couple of other packs joined us on the Saturday, so my tent was no longer the third from the end.
After a good night's sleep I woke up to the view of a bunch of girl faces looking at me saying "Oh look it's a boy", and "Can we keep him". I ended up in a tent with a bunch of ten year old girls who spent the whole night wandering what to do with this random boy they found in their tent.
I didn't get into too much trouble. Well not as much as I did when I was seventeen...
My girlfriend at the time (who was also seventeen) was allowed to go on holiday with me to my grand father's house in Donegal. The week she would make it was a different one from when the rest of my family would be there, so it was decided that I would be spending two weeks there rather than one. The first week would be with my family and my girlfriend would be with me for the second week.
There was nothing to worry about, as we would be under the supervision of my aunt Noreen. As the house was going to be full on the second week, I was going to sleep in a tent in the back garden while Ruth would sleep in the main house sharing a room with some of my cousins.
Well, that was the plan anyway. Unfortunately there was no overlap between the time my family leaving and Ruth arriving. So after some quick talking, we were able to convince my aunt that both sets of parents were OK with the idea of both of us sharing the tent.
Now you dirty minded fools, stop going down that dirt track. Nothing happened, mainly because things like that didn't really cross our minds. I found out later, that my uncle Eamonn was dispatched on a nightly basis to make sure that we didn't get up to anything. He thought it was quite funny how my girlfirend and I would be up to two o'clock in the morning just chatting. By the end of the week, he wanted to burst in on us to give us pointers into what we should be doing.
Anyway, I honestly thought that we had got away with it. You see, the house in Donegal didn't have a phone, and as we weren't doing anything... No harm. No foul. I couldn't have been more wrong.
We got the coach back to Derry, and as it pulled into the bus station, we noticed that her parents and my mother were waiting for us. Sixteen years later, and I can still feel vibrations in my head from the shouting I endured. I'm surprised that we weren't dragged off to the local church to get married off, then and there.
Maybe that's why I don't do camping.
Bye for now