The Escanaba Incident

I was a child when the family camped, so I can't remember the trips in order, or even when the youngest boy, Alan, joined us on the trips. Dad liked to build his own camping gear, eventually building a pop-up camping trailer that looked like two coffins topped by a pup tent. But for this trip he had built a plywood car-top carrier for the family station wagon. The goal of this trip was to travel around Lake Michigan from Chicago, through Michigan, and back through Wisconsin.

The day we entered the Upper Peninsula to camp near Escanaba it was raining. In fact it was pouring. As we pulled into the camp ground Dad decided we shouldn't all get wet, so he got out and pitched the tent. Then Mom pulled on some shoes (she liked to ride barefoot) and helped load all of our belongings into the tent. It was decided that the family would spend the evening eating out and attending a movie.

I remember to this day the name of the movie was Oceans 11. We thought it was good, and so were surprised to see that people were walking out from the front of the theater. When the lights came up at the end we discovered that the theater had flooded! Dad told us to wait under the Marquee in front of the theater and he would bring the car to pick us up.

We watched as Dad came around the corner, the car shifted dramatically to the right almost on two wheels, and a tidal wave of water spilled from the car carrier onto the people waiting on the corner. He pulled quickly up to the front of the theater and yelled for us to get in quick. Then he peeled away. Smooth.

I can't say we were looking forward to a damp night in the tent with the sound or rain on canvas. When we arrived back at the campground we discovered that the tent was filled with water and all our belongings were floating. There appeared to be hundreds of little geysers in the tent floor. Turns out that the shoes Mom grabbed to wear to load stuff into the tent were her golf shoes with spikes, and she had poked little holes all over the tent floor.

We got to sleep in the station wagon in a  pile like puppies that night. It was nice.

Family Camping

Dad was an Army Air Corp veteran of WWII. His plane was shot down over Germany and he had to parachute out. Then, after a forced march, he was held in a POW camp. As such, Dad felt that he should raise his kids to be prepared for any hardships that may come their way.

For many young families of my generation, camping was an economical way to take the family to vacation spots. In our case camping was the vacation, and any sights seen along the way were purely secondary. The whole point in Dad's eyes was to live in a tent, cook over an open fire, and deal with any challenges the out doors might offer.  Here are a few of the family camping stories I remember.