I need to preface this camping tale by telling you just how long I’ve been trying to get to Assateague Island. I’ve had this memory in my mind of going there as a child with my family – perfect, calm shores and ponies magically appearing in beauty and glitter. I’ve wanted to go back ever since we moved to Maryland. Two out of the past four years I’ve forgotten to book a campsite early on in the season, so by the time I remembered they were all taken. The other year, I actually did reserve a campsite but when the time came to go, a hurricane prevented us from actually leaving our house. So yeah…that one didn’t happen.
So, finally! I had made a reservation! We were going to make it out to this super fun beach and see prancing ponies and roast marshmallows by our fire all through the night, and our children would sleep happily in their newly-bought sleeping bags and our FIRST TIME camping with both boys was going to be epically awesome and successful.
Turns out, not a single one of those things happened. Instead, what happened was this:
We had a late start leaving for the campground, and both boys fell asleep on the way there. This seemed great during the three-hour drive, but not so great when they were wide awake at 7:30 at night. We pulled into our site with just enough daylight to set things up (or so we thought). Adam said innocently (…we were so naive…back then…), “Oh look at our cute campsite! It’s secluded and private! I like it.” I was thrilled to hear him say this, as generally he is quite particular about his campsites. We backed into our site and I said, “I’ll get out and start unloading!”
This part must be imagined in slow motion: I opened my car door, slid out my leg, which was exposed from the knee down, and my foot landed on the pavement. Before I had time to swing my second leg down, I looked at my white flesh and gasped – it was now COVERED in mosquitoes. THAT quickly. My eyes bugged (ha) out of my head, and I turned slowly towards Adam, my mouth open in disgust and just a bit impressed with the speed of those suckers. My mind shifted and quickly stepped into Mission Impossible mode, locking and loading my squirt bottle of child-friendly bug spray. Spritz-spritz, spritz-spritz. There! Ha! That oughtta do it.
They were immune!! They fed quicker and sucked harder. They rolled and frolicked in my pansy spritzy repellent, laughing in my face. I eat this stuff for breakfast! They shouted.
That made me angry. Here’s a selfie I took at that exact moment:
So, I brought out the canons. The 100% poison. The pure Deet. For the next two days, I would live in a constant cloud of Deet. It burned my lungs and singed my eyes and I felt a bit guilty for exposing my young children to it but it was survival mode.
After that, everything just went downhill. Turns out, Rhenner cries like, all the time. Axton whines like a teenage girl without her cell phone, and Adam and Meghan get cranky in the midst of heat and mosquito storms (and said children whining). Our one saving grace for this trip was a canopy with a screening to go around it. Without it, we would have spent the next 48 hours inside our tent. No moving, just sobbing and huddling in the corner.
Anyway, we got the canopy set up and I sat in there with the boys while Adam set up our brand new, “Thirty-Second setup” tent.
Adam was moving pretty quickly to get it up (in 30 seconds!) and while positioning one of the poles, he ended up taking a huge chunk out of his thumb. He quickly wrapped it up in some paper towel, as we had forgotten our first aid kit, and then finished putting the tent up. When his thumb had bled through the paper towel, he decided he’d better go to the store to get something to properly clean and wrap it up. At this point, it was 10:15 at night. The nearest store was 20 minutes away and closed at 11pm. He hopped in the car – whining Axton in tow – and buzzed off. Leaving Rhenner and I alone. In the dark. On an island. In the tent. I didn’t know what to do with a one-year-old wide awake at 10 o’clock at night with nothing to entertain him but pillows and sheets.
But that hour, alone in the tent with Rhenner? That one single hour is the most cherished memory I will take away from that trip. I kept thinking, “He will never remember this. He won’t remember how we giggled and rolled around on the sleeping bags, or how he tumbled into my lap and let me rub his belly. He won’t remember us putting our foreheads together and acting like teenagers with melty eyes that only see each other.” And then I thought, “He may not remember it – but these moments are still forming a friendship, connecting our love deeper. This is still a bonding experience for him to trust and love me. He may not remember it….but I will.” I teared up that night, alone in then tent with my one year old.
About the time that Adam should have been getting back, I called him up and he said, “I’ve got a story for you.” Oh great, I thought. What else could happen tonight? Turns out, Adam was trying to get to the store just a little too quickly and had a friendly reminder to always obey the speed limit, even when one is injured. He was lucky enough to use his thumb as his excuse, and the officer let him off with a warning. He came back to the campsite with a sleeping Axton and we all slept as well as we could. Actually, the boys slept great. We brought their mattresses so they didn’t know anything different. Us, on the other hand? Well we slept on a goopy air mattress with a slow leak and I couldn’t stop jerking awake thinking Rhenner was going roll off his bed. No worries, though, Rhenner woke up at 5am so I didn’t have to check on him for too long.
In the morning, I was optimistic. “We can go check out the beach and see horses and play, play, play!” I rushed everyone through breakfast and then we walked across the grass to the “beach.” In quotations. Because it wasn’t a beach it was an opening to dirty, nasty water. Okay, okay, I get it. We camped on the wrong side of the island. We camped on the BAY side, not the ATLANTIC side. No big deal, we’ll just hop in the car and drive to the other side. Again, spirits are still high. We parked the car and the closer we got to the ocean the less mosquitoes attacked us. I could breathe air that wasn’t coated in Deet. Here are happy photos that make it look like our camping trip was going exactly how we had pictured it would:
(That’s a mosquito bite on Rhenner’s head, not an egg from a bonk)
But actually, that beach was nasty. With a capital N. Walking out to the water meant you had to go through a patch of slimey sand that was so sticky it would goop to the bottom of your foot and stay caked there until you actually reached the water and could rinse it off. And once you did reach the water, it wasn’t much better because the water actually looked like pulpy lemonade, not ocean. When a wave would come in, it carried with it tiny, see-through balls that were slippery and reminded me of jelly-fish heads. They were scattered all over the beach and added to the slipperiness of the sand. I would watch as each wave also brought in these tiny little bug-like crabs that, if you watched closely, you could see scuttle their little butts into the sand.
Axton, of course, was clueless and just having a jolly good time splashing and running around, while I was standing there totally disgusted and being all spoiled by my Hawaii beaches. I obliged when Axton asked me to take him out deeper into the water, but came screaming back to the shore when not one, but TWO somethings nibbled on my toes within two minutes of being out there.
So the beach was a bit disappointing for me, but at least it was a place of refuge from the Dinosaur Mosquitoes waiting for us back at our campsite. If I didn’t go down by the water, and just hung out in the clean (ahem, “clean” – I had to literally rip balls of horse poop out of Rhenner’s hands and chuck them as far away from our towels as I could) sand, then I could enjoy the sun and the wind.
Back at our campground, the super majestic ponies were waiting for us. Were they prancing through the water, tossing their manes and glistening the sun off their shiny coats like I had imagined?
Not quite.
Oh hay guyz. Just eatin’ your grass by the bathroom.
Mini marshmallows in our hot chocolate was as close as we could get to Smores because the mosquitoes have steel lungs and were even unaffected by campfire smoke.
Our second – and last! – night camping, I slept on Rhenner’s tiny crib mattress while he slept with Adam on the air mattress. Trust me, it was better this way. When I woke up in the morning, my first thought was, “yay! We get to leave today! Let’s hurry and….oh. Yep. There’s the pouring rain. I was waiting for that.”
So we packed up our tent and all our belongings and got soaking wet, but we were all ready to get on out of there. My second favorite part about this whole trip was that we finally figured out we could shove the dog in between Axton and Rhenner instead of me! This meant that for the first time since we’ve had Kaleo, I got to sit by Adam in the front seat! And no one threw up!
….Well, wait. That’s a lie. As we pulled out of the park, I asked Adam to pull over for a second so I could take one last picture of the bay, and just as he did…..Rhenner threw up.
The end.
Just kidding. I mean, yes, it was definitely not my favorite trip. I would really like to not repeat that weekend. But I definitely know things could have gone a lot worse. I came home and recounted some of this to one of my best friends and she said, “But you sure made a lot of memories!” And she was right. I’ll never forget this trip to Assateague. My kids will, and that’s okay. Adam and I can laugh and reminisce and say, “Now that was a camping trip to remember!” Mostly, it made me appreciate all the hard work that my parents did for me growing up so that I could begin my love (and sometimes hate) relationship with camping. Now I’m just passing on the torch to my boys!
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