Emily Kaye Lazzaro

Billy and I are going camping this weekend, you guys!  We’re going with some local friends and we’re taking Daisy and it might be horrible but we’ll see!  Maybe she’ll escape and drown in a lake or something ahhhhh I have these horrible visions, I swear I’m going to be the most neurotic parent, best of luck to my future children!

Our tent.  A classic.

This weekend is the first of two camping weekends we have planned for the summer.  Every year (unless somebody gets married) we go camping with my friends from high school.  This year we’re going over Labor Day weekend.  Now, if you knew me as a teenager you would be like, “You?  Camping?  But doesn’t that involve too much activity and picking up of heavy things and moving around of your body?  Where will you sit sullenly and watch teenage television dramas from the 90′s?”  To which I would respond, yes, I don’t want to go camping, let’s just stay home and read magazines.  But my high school friends and I started camping the summers we were home from college because we wanted to get away from our parents and it was the cheapest way to do so.  Hi parents!  Sorry about that!  I like you now!

Oof.  This one’s from 2006.  My sweatshirt has an erection.

We first camped in Rhode Island at a state park that doesn’t allow alcohol and also we were like nineteen years old anyway, so it was definitely frowned-upon.  But we were used to hiding our liquor and we were pros because we were all over-achieving basket cases convinced we’d never get a job in our lives if anybody ever caught us drinking, so we figured it out.  From there we started branching out.  One year we went camping in New Jersey at someplace called the Turkey Swamp I think?  If that isn’t a red flag I don’t know what is.  It was cursed from the start.  My friends got themselves kicked out of the campground for drinking before Billy and I even arrived so we slept in the car that night and the next day packed it up and headed to a motel on the Jersey shore where we paid something like $900 for a room for one night because everything else was booked.  And there were like eight of us sleeping on two beds and on the floor.  And I think somebody pooped in the motel pool, not one of my friends, some child probably.  Or a pervert.  Anyway.  Ugh, that was terrible.  Or great, depending on how much time has passed.  I remember it fondly, to be honest.

Another year we drove down to Pennsylvania and went on a canoeing trip down the Susquehanna.  It was a two day canoe trip with no guide, which in retrospect was kind of a horrible idea.  At least 75% of my friends from high school are categorically indoor kids with extensive knowledge of comic books, nail polish colors, and/or Christopher Guest movies.  And little to no knowledge of wilderness survival.  So we camped over night at a random spot and it thunderstormed like a beast and there was no bathroom AT ALL.  We peed on a log, it was horrible.  The next day we canoed back to the pick up location, my friend Katie capsized her canoe and lost a bunch of stuff in the river, and we all had to book it to the canoe place to poop because we’d been holding our poop.  We do not at all know how to poop in the woods.  We are not bears or the Pope or however that saying goes.  This trip, as well, I remember fondly.  Why does memory work that way?

After the Turkey Swamp fiasco and the canoeing fiasco we decided to stick with what we knew, which was the Rhode Island state park, so we did that for a couple years.  But now that we’re all in our mid- to late-twenties (to thirties if we’re Billy) the time has come to go to a campground that allows drinking for god’s sake.  We’re adults.  And we’ve spread all over the country (plus Germany, in fact).  The east coast contingent is going to get together this year.  Rhode Island just isn’t feasible for everybody so we’re going back to… New Jersey.  But this time we’re prepared.  We are of age.  We are not going to get blackout, puke-face, skinny-dipping drunk.  We’re going to be normal about it.  We’ll sit around a fire with box wine in plastic cups, eating Doritos and telling stories we all have memorized about all our previous camping endeavors.  Ugh, life is so great sometimes, you guys.