So, You’ve Found Yourself Camping with a Toddler
It’s possible that before you became a parent you enjoyed traveling. It’s also possible that in the process of becoming a parent, you promised yourself and, perhaps, a partner that your incoming child would change your life in ways profound and small but that they wouldn’t change your favorite activities or how often you do them. Going to restaurants, say, or taking vacations during which you stayed in hotels.
Restaurants can be done, but the pleasure of a hotel—one that you promised yourself you would never forsake—will vanish in an instant on your child’s first birthday. Conveniences become day-ruining obstacles, amenities left untouched. And yet here you are, finding yourself in need of several nights away from your apartment or you will commit an act of terror. Perhaps at this moment a small voice will ask:
Have you considered camping?
It’s a pastime Americans and others have enjoyed since it was called living, and many blogs with names like “Has Stroller Will Travel” and “Beanie and BooBoo’s Passport to Fun” suggest it as a great way to escape the city with children under three, since it’s relatively easy, it’s inexpensive, and in the outdoors there is probably no one to seriously offend. Fool that I am, I read about Beanie and BooBoo’s adventure and thought, My child and I could do that, too.
If you are, like me, someone utterly foreign to the idea of gear, you might consider going to a campsite that caters to you. Autocamp is one such option, and I chose it for this reason. The company runs a chain of sites (you might call them glampsites, but I’m not quite sure what that means other than “costs money” and “has bathrooms”) across the United States in desirable locations like Zion, Utah; Yosemite, California; and Asheville, North Carolina. You might, as I did, choose their outpost in Cape Cod for the highest combination of pleasure and ease, as Cape Cod is beautiful and is only a 30-minute flight from JFK, which is crucial, since you may have been blessed, as I have, with a toddler who is passionate about throwing up in the car.
The flight may be delayed by four hours, meaning you may arrive at the airport in Hyannis 45 minutes after all of the car-rental locations have closed. This will be an issue, since Autocamp’s location in Falmouth is 50 minutes away, most Ubers don’t come with a car seat, and every driver in the region has taken off work because they are “tired from the Kenny Chesney concert.” Not to worry, because three hours later you will have dragged your and your young family’s asses to a highway Chinese buffet, ordered, sniffed and put down one lychee martini, and secured a ride with the sole available driver in all of seafaring Massachusetts. Your toddler falls asleep on the drive there. All is well.
Autocamp’s Cape Cod location feels like a lovely little town, with several small neighborhoods filled with three types of lodging (cabins, luxury tents, and Airstreams) all positioned around a main clubhouse and lawn. You might choose to stay in an Airstream, since it has doors you can close and space for a travel crib, yet still possesses the rugged charm of Americana.
Perhaps the toddler shit himself on the drive and is now losing his mind and it is one full hour after his bedtime. You change him, forcibly transfer him to his crib, shut the door of the Airstream, and wait for him to figure it out. You take a deep breath and smell leaves and dirt. This is camping. Beautiful.
The next morning, things will be glorious. Your toddler wakes up around 6:00 A.M., which means you will have a mere one hour to kill in total darkness before the sun rises and coffee and granola become available in the “clubhouse” for free and a few breakfast items are available for money. This is a blessing, as in the unrelenting torture of yesterday, you may have forgotten about your responsibility to feed anyone.
While even hotels that proclaim themselves child friendly the loudest can turn up their noses at toddlers who don’t have the brain power to sit still, one unexpected joy of this little village is how powerfully the opposite is true. At 7:30 A.M., children and their besieged parents run this town, playing with large knockoff Connect Four sets, stacking pillows into small huts and stoically sitting inside them, and pulling down all the sweatshirts hanging in the gift shop. And the space’s design—at once modern and also somehow shriek dampening—accommodates that. You may even meet a couple that lives in the Hudson Valley with a son just four days younger than yours and feel the thrill of the vacation friend. Although you’ve seen the Danish horror film Speak No Evil and know how this would likely end if you grew closer, you choose not to bring that up.
You may remember you don’t have a car because of the Kenny Chesney concert and that the best way of getting one is to walk, as a family, 30 minutes down the beautifully wooded Shining Sea Bikeway to the Hertz. And that is a wonderful plan if you forget that your son has dedicated his young life to protesting the existence of strollers.
You will make it five minutes before he yells, “Outoutoutout.” You will ignore him. He will persist. You might say, “I guess it is vacation” and unshackle him, hoisting his dense, wriggling body out of the travel stroller and onto the ground, where his legs may immediately give out and he will collapse into a wailing heap. Do not lose heart—he will recover and stand. He will stare. He will take three steps so tiny it’s as if he hasn’t moved at all, then look blankly into the distance until you suggest he get into the stroller, to which he will object with powerful vigor. You will say, “Okay, I’m sorry,” and hand him a stick that he will dote on and cradle like a baby until slamming it into the concrete path until it splinters in two. At this point, you may remember that you’ve made zero progress on your walk and wonder if you ever will or, instead, spend the remainder of your life standing here, a mere six feet from the entrance, which might as well be 6,000 miles filled with radioactive snow.
It may take triple the time it should and deplete several reserves of patience and goodwill, but you will ultimately obtain a bad car and use it to drive to Woods Hole, where you will visit the aquarium and Stony Beach. Your toddler loves these things and he is happy, and so are you.
The next day—your last full day there, so it needs to be good to make your collective agony worth it—there is a severe thunderstorm watch, and you (the collective) are in misery. You text the front desk something along the lines of “What will become of us?” They respond quickly and kindly with the addresses of several bowling alleys, but unfortunately your toddler doesn’t have any of the skills that would make him a competent bowler. You Google “Airstream lightning death.” Your father texts you an article about Massachusetts’s recent human case of eastern equine encephalitis, but that’s neither here nor there.
But after about 45 minutes of feeling sorry for yourself, the rain stops. And the general manager of the campsite appears at the door of your fancy bus with parking passes to Wood Neck Beach, a small, rocky strip flanked by Buzzards Bay on one side and Little Sippewissett Marsh on the other. You arrive there in the late afternoon; the storm has left everything gray and chilly, and you’re the only people there. The toddler spends 20 minutes picking up rocks and throwing them several inches into the air. He sees the abandoned shell of a horseshoe crab and screams. You take a picture of him squinting into the distance at one black bird and one white bird, a sliver of his tiny potbelly peeking out from the bottom of his T-shirt, and it is, without exaggeration, the most beautiful picture you’ve ever seen.
Back at the campsite, miraculously, it may be dry enough to cook on the bonfire. Your toddler, who has never seen real flames before, watches intently, somehow for once aware that this is actually a high-stakes situation and he needs to remain sitting still on his little log. When it’s ready, you give him half a cob of corn, and he eats it as he walks slowly around the path of your little section of campsite, pointing to every light and saying, “Light.” You see your new vacation friends following their toddler around, and the two boys climb onto and then fall off of the same rock. It is all incredibly wholesome. You say goodnight and herd your own child back to your area for bedtime. He is calm and lovely. You could see yourself doing this again.
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