Camping in the oven

This week our daughter Yen was suffering from some bad luck. She was invited by her fried to her house to play, then extended the stay b/c her friend wanted Yen to join her brother's birthday party. However, for some reason, when I went to pick Yen up, her friend's parents hadn't start the party yet. All the kids asked me "Can Yen stay?" But her parents said no. It wasn't really a problem for me but I didn't want to impose, so I brought her home. She was nearly in tears when she walked out of her friend's house.

I felt bad for her, so the next day I planned a fishing trip w/ her. Her older brother gave her a fishing pole and she really wanted to try it out. I knew nothing about fishing, but I thought the point was to let her try and made her happy. Well, the whole story was posted on the last blog; we didn't get any luck. But it was a good try in my opinion.

On Wednesday, she kept on asking me about camping. We've kind of planned a camping trip in the beginning of this week cause our oldest son Mike was away for summer camp in Colorado, and we thought we could have some fun ourselves too. But the weather was unstable so we kept on postponing. Yen was keeping on pushing me to have this trip, and finally I decided that Friday was the day for me to keep my promise.

My wife wasn't very fond of the idea. She doesn't like sweating, and she hates the idea of sleeping in a tiny tent in the middle of nowhere w/out all the comforts and safety at home. But I said it was a promise for kids and we had to fulfill it. Plus it could be a family time, and if that really worked then in the future we could save hotel money in our family trip.

So we made all the preparation. Boy, I didn't know we had to bring so many things for a camping trip!! Our tiny car was totally full, and we had to put the tents we rented ($20 for two 4-person tents) on Yen's lap. But at 4:30pm we were off! It should be a fun time, we believed.

We went to a place I and my two boys went this spring. We had a very good time: the food was great, we built a fire in a cold night, and we talked under the stars. That really was a great time. So I thought we could duplicate that experience.

Boy, I couldn't be more wrong.

Now we all can easily see why this trip was doomed to failure, but I was so caught up in the beautiful experience I had that I didn't see many obvious problems. We realized our mistakes very soon though: after 10 minutes we got there, I wanted to escape and go home as fast as I could, like running away from hell.

All the problems could be summed up into a four-letter word: HEAT.

IT WAS HOT!!!! And stupid as I was, I told my kids not to bring more than one bottle of water cause I remembered I didn't finish half of bottle on the last trip. I didn't use my head and think that my last trip was at the end of the winter. Now we were stuck in this OVEN and we couldn't drink water as much as we needed. My wife's face very soon turned bluish, then red, then finally purple. She now walked like a zombie and looked like would drop in any minute. Ben and Yen's faces were red and their eyes were crossed.

I started cooking the food. Meanwhile tons of bugs were outrageously happy b/c four humans were stupid enough to come to their territory at this time of the day to be their dinner and entertainment. The bug's spray on us seemed to attract MORE bugs to investigate us. Maybe it was labeled "bug's spray: attract all the bugs you want." I must check the damn spray again.

"I'm tired and hungry," Ben whined. "Just a minute, I'm cooking." I said. Yen hid in the tent and read the book she brought. My wife couldn't talk.

Finally, we started to eat something: corns, fish, potatoes, and carrots. It was the only cool thing in this trip: the food was not bad.

But after that, we just sit there and didn't know what to do. It was too hot to do anything. Yen planned to fish but we had to walk a distance to reach the creek. And surely nobody wanted to "play;" anything that required to move a muscle was too much to ask. We brought marshmallows, chocolate, and gram crackers, but the marshmallows were sticky and chocolate was in liquid.

It was only 2 hours into our trip, and everybody was cooked.

I tried to escape by retrieving into the tent, like Yen did. But 2 minutes in there I sweat even more. The only good thing was no bugs. "Gosh! How could you stay in there!?" I ran out of the tent. But my wife, who was sampled by mosquitoes, finally hid in the tent w/ Yen. Ben later got into another tent and tried to read. I admired that.

"Let's go home." I finally said.

"No!" Yen protested.

"Why not?"

"I want to sleep here; I want to see the stars."

Stars? I saw them in front of my eyes now. You didn't see them? And sleep here? Are you kidding?

After long suffering, finally at around 8pm, 3 1/2 hours into the trip, Yen gave in, and we packed home.

The moment we got into our cooler home, I recalled the Disney cartoon when Goofy brought his son to carnival and they had a roller-coaster ride together. After the ride, Goofy crawled out of the car and kissed the ground.

I felt like kissing my home too.