It began with a six month old daughter carefully laid to sleep between us in our A frame tent, and continues 28 years later with the three of them and Dad (each summer for at least one weekend) in our big family tent. The fairies of the woods of Monhegan Island remain our favorite.

According to a lot of sources, tent camping was very much in vogue during the Great Depression. And when I was growing up in the period immediately after WWII, just about everyone my family knew took vacations that involved tent camping. Only the super-rich stayed in hotels or fancy lodges in Yosemite or Yellowstone. But then recreational vehicles began to be presaged by small camp trailers (I helped my father rivet together a kit of aluminum sheets to make a tiny "teardrop" trailer that had an ice box (no, not a refrigerator, and ice box which was kept cold by getting blocks of ice about once a day and putting them in one side of the ice box with the stuff to be kept cold on the other side). The "kitchen" was under a lid on the back with a slot to store the coleman 2-burner stove and various pots, pans, dishes, and flatware. We could fit all 4 of us in the sleeping compartment, at least as long as my sister and I were less than 10 years old (when I reached 10, I demanded and got my very own pup tent - 2 military surplus shelter halves that buttoned together, although we often just laid the blankets out on a ground cloth under the stars). When we went to the national parks or up to one of the other reservations in the mountains around Prescott, Flagstaff, or someplace like the White Apache Reservation, the fancy folk had cots in their tents, while the rest of us just slept on the ground - no pads, no air mattresses. That included the hunting and fishing expeditions - the deer we killed and dressed and the fish we caught were an important part of our diet - none of this "sport" stuff where you stuffed and mounted the deer head to hang on the wall - you wouldn't stuff the chicken you ate for dinner, or the Thanksgiving turkey, would you?

Hunting and fishing these days is very different - "sport", not a food source. And most people when travelling stay in motels (got to have that hot shower every day) or at least an RV that has a full kitchen and a king-sized bed, along with a TV (only TVs were black and white, and in our village there was only one TV until 1950 or 51 - all the kids used to go over in the afternoons to watch Kukla, Fran, and Ollie).

(the Old GreyBearded One, continues mumbling in his beard while rocking in the chair on the veranda about the Good Old Days .... something about hiking 5 miles to school every day in 10 foot snow drifts in 120F temperatures during sand storms ...)

My parents were camping in the mountains of New York in the big canvas I-pole tents with the thick wooden poles and hemp ropes holding the tent up with wooden stakes, back in the 1940's. The kind that if it was raining and you touched the inside of the canvas with your finger the tent would leak at that point.

And they slept on the old wooden canvas cots.

My first trip was in the summer of 1956 when I was 6 months old. Later when I was older I remember going to the garbage dumps at night and watching the bears forage thru them. I see it in my mind a image of cars with all their headlight aimed at the dump to watch the bears.