How to camp

So you want to go camping. Beware, for this is a daring endeavor only undertaken by those not faint of heart.

Now that the disclaimer is taken care of, here's how to go camping:

First, you have to decide that you want to go on an adventure. After you surf the web and discover that an amusement park or another country is way out of your budget, you settle on camping because there's nothing like paying to sleep on the ground for fun. You then settle on a general location where you deem the ground worthy of your presence, and then postpone your plans because life and work sidelines you.

Fast-forward two months. You realize time is quickly running out for your excursion, so you make hasty plans, book a campsite, call up a friend or two and invite them, rearrange your plans because the grandiose ones you had before are simply too expensive, and then stop planning again because life.

Wait until the day of the trip to pack. Since you plan to be gone only two nights in a familiar area, you don't need to worry about bringing that many clothes. Never mind that the weather is highly unpredictable or that you'll be outside and very likely to get dirty; packing will be a breeze and there will be nothing to worry over.

While you're at it, you may as well postpone all of your planning until the day of the trip. Meals, clothes, cooking utensils, etc. Basically anything that you might take with you can wait until the day of. Of course, this doesn't mean that you can't gather all of your gear and make sure that you have it, but deciding what is important and necessary only takes a few hours and shouldn't be bothered over until the absolute last minute.

Once you get to the loading point of your trip, you don't really need to bother to discriminate between what you need to take and what is unnecessary, because let's face it: you'll be camping in the woods and the trunk of your sedan is infinite. It's perfectly feasible to cram the the entire house in there, let alone enough gear for four girls.

After the car is packed, go grocery shopping. Of course, you don't need a list, so just buy things from memory. This may or may not lead to buying things that are completely unnecessary, but don't sweat it because you have an infinite trunk.

While you're loading the car with your groceries, realize that you really can't fit everything into the car and maybe you do need less stuff or a bigger vehicle.

Opt for the vehicle and drive back to your house to swap out for a minivan.

Drive off again and show up at your campsite. Set up in the rain. Decide that you're hungry, so you work on setting up a campfire to roast hotdogs. Because everything is wet from the rain, the fire won't start. But that's the food that you have, so of course the fire's going to get lit. Enlist help from an eagle scout you find down the road. His fire goes out. Drive into town and wander around until you find a grocery store to buy charcoal and lighter fluid. Drive back. By the time you get there, the fire should already be lit.

Eat dinner, hang around, clean up, explore the campground and take a quick dip in the nearby river, and then go to bed.

Get up heinously late after not sleeping at all, eat breakfast (also cooked over the fire, which takes forever), clean up, drive into town for no reason other than to get juice, then drive back and go for an hour to get to a swimming hole. Eat lunch while you're there. Swim. Wash your hair. Drive back.

Cook dinner. Again, it takes heinously long, firstly because it involves having a fire lit and your friend is overly possessive of the fire, and two, because meat and potatoes take a long time to cook. The food will finally be cooked just as it begins to rain. You tough it out. The rain stops enough to clean up and your friend decides it would be a grand plan to try cooking something else. You do your best to dissuade her but she is a stubborn thing and persists on.

So you explore and talk to people until another camping buddy comes to get you for the monkey bread that is not done. So you sit in the tent and wait and it is still not done. Your cooking friend thinks it will be fine to eat raw. It is not. So it gets thrown away and you play cards until you're all too tired to care about doing anything else so you sleep.

And then you wake up in the morning, pack up, and drive back. Clean the dishes that you used, unpack your bags, let the tent dry out, and sleep because you really didn't get much sleep while you were gone. The ground isn't really comfortable.

And that is how to have a camping trip.