Tag: camping

March 20, 2025 – Old Habits Die Harder

March 20, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I had to do it. When I first heard that the name of Die Hard 2 was Die Harder, I couldn’t believe it. That is the stupidest title I have ever heard. Now I guess that I will make fun of myself a little bit today.

When I think about who I thought I would be at say 15 and who I am now at 50, it seems light years away. The truth is, I found it difficult to really imagine what my life would be ‘when I grew up’. I know that I didn’t imagine that I would be publicly writing everyday and enjoying it. Likewise, I didn’t think that I would be the primary cook with frequent fancy embellishments.

As I have written about in the past, my life changed fairly drastically between 15 and 18. At 15, I had yet to get engaged in sports. I learned that I could push myself beyond my wildest capabilities and really impacted my psyche. Nevertheless, there are still some things that predate all of that.

One of my habits is reading. I used to see how many books I could read in a week. I was constantly at the library checking out books to read. It started off with series books like The Hardy Boys. Then, I moved on to specific authors like Dean Koontz, Steven King and Tom Clancy. There were a lot of others along the way as well.

Of course I still read but I don’t spend all day Saturday doing it anymore. In fact, I try to set a goal of a chapter a day. I probably only hit that twenty-five percent of the time. It would be a rare day that I read more than a chapter however. Probably as long as I can see, I will probably be reading. A book is typically the first thing that I pack when I am getting ready for a trip.

When I was a young teenager, I wanted my life to be hunting in the fall and camping and fishing in the summer. I did a lot of camping as a youth and even more as a Boy Scout. Honestly, what got me soured on camping was the amount of stuff we have to take to get the whole family out. Trust me, I want to be comfortable but I don’t want to take days of packing and putting away.

I’ve got one summer trip like that in me a year. But my recent effort into getting me geared up for backpacking has actually gotten me excited to go camping again. I used to feel guilty about the thought of going alone but my wife takes trips without me all the time. I would love it if she would want to go and I hope that she does but I am just going to start doing it myself.

The fishing has really suffered. I try to do it at least once a year but that is so sad. Can you imagine wanting to do it every weekend as a youth to trying to make time as an adult? Part of why I even do that is because I feel like I paid for the license I owe it to myself to not waste it. Maybe this camping renewal will get me more outings this year.

As to hunting, I thought that I would try for anything that I was allowed when I had the freedom to make my own decisions. I have never done that and probably won’t at this point. Just like fishing, I try to buy a tag and go out at least once. Man it is hard to schedule stuff like hunting in when there are family dinners and sports activities and trap and all that on the schedule.

Even though we spent a lot of time hunting, we didn’t recreationally shoot much. We didn’t have a good place to do it. So, we really didn’t. I guess that this is the one thing that I actually do more of as an adult than I did when I was younger. I pay for a range membership, I volunteer coach for the trap team so I have positioned myself to be around it as much as I can afford.

While I don’t get to the range enough either, I shoot air rifles almost daily. It is a small little thing that I can do that is inexpensive and accessible. In a way, I feel like it is my connection to my youth dreams.

End Your Programming Routine: My dad said that you have to make time if you want to do something. I don’t disagree with that, I am pretty guilty of thinking I want to do this or that and not sharing. Then all of a sudden, my calendar is filled with things that are not what I really want to do. Ultimately, I feel like my commitments as a father and a husband supersede my own desires. This likely stems from my youth when my dad prioritized his hunting and fishing. As I said, old habits die harder.

October 4, 2021 – Let the Pictures Speak

October 4, 2021 /

This was my view when I woke up yesterday morning. You are looking at Mt. Thielson in central Oregon. As I said on Friday, I was going fishing last weekend with my family. Because of Covid, because of everything that went on this summer, because of some philosophical differences I have with my wife, this was the first and probably only family campout of the year.

Nearly everything was perfect, nearly. The only thing that wasn’t great was the fishing but it was OK in that we caught some fish. The weather was in the mid-seventies, the lows were above the freezing. The wind was light and the company was nice.

A little bit about my philosophical differences with my wife. We both enjoyed camping when we met. It is just that her idea was a camp ground that required showers and bathrooms with running water. I would say that I am not entirely opposed to that concept but there are so many beautiful and new experiences that we could do that are limited by that criteria. Over the years our necessities grew as well and required a trailer or second vehicle to haul everything that I get burned out just packing.

I suspect that at some point, there will be an RV in our future. With that, there are definitely more creature comforts and hopefully less packing to get out the door. I would also like an RV from the standpoint that it makes it easier to enjoy some of these places like I was this weekend without the constraints of running water required.

My goal this time was to be light and agile. I did bring some extra stuff like my hunting pack (just in case) and camp chairs (and the dog which was easier than finding someone to watch her). We only brought no cook or freeze dried meals which made cleanup easier and cooking faster, so we could spend more time fishing.

You can see my biggest freshwater fish I think that I have ever caught. I measured it at 16″. That is on the dinner menu tonight. That was the only fish I caught. Unfortunately, my son didn’t catch a fish. I think all told, our party caught around twelve in the duration of the trip from Thursday to Sunday. Not great when you consider the limit of (5×3)4 + (2*5)2 = 80 possible. But hey, I said my favorite kind of fishing was the one I was doing, and that is the truth.

End Your Programming Routine: As I said on Friday, I have passed up too many opportunities to spend time with my family because I have been ‘too busy’. I suspect that if I was not a single parent and not blocked it on the calendar, I probably would have found an excuse to miss this one as well. I am very happy that I made the effort to make part of the trip even though it was a lot of work. I hope that I can get my act together so that this will happen again in the future.

June 17, 2020 – ‘Tacticool’ Thursday and the previous week

July 17, 2020 /

The reason I was gone was that we were ‘bugging out’. This is our first camping trip in several years. One of the reasons is that I drag my feet when it comes to camping is that my wife and I differ on how and what to do. She tends to only want to go to large parks with showers and such which drives me nuts. I have more solitude at home. Another reason is that, I really prefer a minimalist gear experience, but for the family is a day’s worth of prep on both sides to get all the stuff together.

Nevertheless, we went Monday through Thursday with some friends to a more primative and smaller campground in the middle of the week. It was mostly young families, pretty quiet. But let us get back to the subject at hand, bugging out.

Bugging out is a prepper term for leaving your primary residence on short notice. It would be the opposite of bugging in which is sheltering in place with minimal outside contact (kind of like what we have been doing since March). Depending on the length of the journey, you are ‘living off the land’ as you move to get to your final destination.

Why the heck would you bug out? Well some good reasons would be localized flooding for instance Hurricane Katrina or more likely in our case wildfires or you don’t want to be caught in the middle of a daily BLM riot. When the option to leave is better than the option to stay, you would bug out.

Now is a good interlude to inject some reality into the mall ninja line of thought. ‘I’ll just go into the back woods and take what I want. All I need is a rifle and knife.’ First, you are going to be competing with all the other idiots that think this way. Second, during the whole time, I saw nothing larger than a chipmunk so if you don’t have skill and knowledge of the area your chances of success are quite slim.

Camping is a good way to test your gear, skills and mettle. I have really tried to make my life easier by creating containers with dedicated gear so that it is an easier preparation to go. The problem is the stuff seems to grow more and more. Some of the stuff in the back of the photo we didn’t even use, like the generator (nor did we really need). It is kind of nice to have nearly a full kitchen without having to steal from the kitchen.

The way our cache has grown is over the years, if we needed something on the trip, we added it to stay with the camping gear. It is the little things that are probably the most helpful such as tin foil (for our hats), zip lock bags for leftovers and cooking utensils. Sometimes old cookware got rotated out the kitchen and into the the camping pile. We had an amount of basic spices that stay with the gear like onion, garlic, salt and pepper which is nice to not have to remember such things.

It can also be good to work on your improvising skills and not have everything you need. Cooking over a fire is a good example where often it is an exercise in doing with what you have on hand be it cooking surfaces or utensils. I cant say that we had everything we wanted on this trip. Had we been alone and not with another family, we would have done a few things differently but it worked out.

This year, it is particularly difficult. More people are ‘staycationing’ or staying close to home. I read that records are being set for boat sales this year, supporting that trend. The large parks always fill up fast and reservations usually need to be made in the spring time for summer weekends. But, I think that if you get off the beaten path a bit or are willing to travel a few hours, camping can be done on short notice.