Stories from the outdoors

08/01/08

When I bought my first tent, my mom told my I was crazy; I told her to think of it as a folding hotel room. It was an awfully small hotel room, just a 6×6 wall tent (I think they were 6? walls, it was just above getting a pup tent.) My friends and I went all over the place with that little tent...an Emmy Lou Harris concert in New York, a beach trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and the wilds of Bethany, WV, where we nearly got trampled by a herd of deer. It slept three, if you were good friends and didn't mind using your packs as pillows. It was actually comfortable for two.

Even though my husband's family had a pop-up camper when he was a kid, we went a different direction with our camping entirely. Instead, we added time periods and added canvas tents suitable for the Revolutionary and Civil War periods. Non-historic camping now generally involved a cabin, and with a little shopping around or a check of state park sites, we did well by searching for deals. Pennsylvania state parks generally open their campgrounds from March through late December and the state Website offers a wealth of information about the facilities, the park features and the surrounding area. You can find everything from rustic sites accessible only by foot to lodges that will sleep up to 14 people at the state parks.