Family Goes to Girls Camp

When Daddy goes, we all go--one of our many family mottos. As Bishop, my sweet hubby, should attend girls camp and really how can a father camp with out his family. The answer to this tricky question is he cannot, ever, never, ever camp without his kids (wife may sometimes be excluded. This has not yet happened but a woman can dream.)

What I was most excited about after spotting, washing, folding three loads of laundry (just in case clothes were needed on our trip), battling with the kids to not wake up their brother from his one and only nap, was the trip to the grocery store for junk food. No camping trip or any road trip for that matter can be experienced without Doritos. No camping trip can begin with out marshmallows (note camping trips from summers past when my second child ate only marshmallows for three days. You could not remove the the roasting stick from his grasp. The concept of cooking sugar on an open fire with the utensil of a stick was way too much to resist.)

Thankfully most memories of packing misery were erased with high fructose corn syrup and MSG. We arrived at girls camp, set up camp, and ate, of course, sloppy joes and iceburg lettuce with ranch. Despite finishing the entire bag of Doritos, a donut from the next morning's breakfast I ate the "manwhich," ground beef mixed with some sort of seasoning packet with likely ingredient-- Mono Sodium Glutamate also found in our previously eaten Doritos.

These women who ran the camp, feeding hundred + were amazing. They ran their primitive kitchen like a well run cafeteria. It was spotless. I cant make microwavable macaroni at home with out massive kitchen fall out. Dishes are strew, utensils fly, and elbow noodles are dropped under the table by the bowlful. Yet a dinner salad, pasta salad, sloppy joes, and pineapple upsidedown cake cooked in dutch ovens was done flawlessly. I somehow missed out on the pioneer women organization and do everything and make it look easy gene. I can make pretty much everything looked flawfully difficult. From all sides of my family, it is pioneer stock. Every single one is a crossing the plains kind of ancestor. Yet with out canning, harvesting my own garden, sewing, mending, hand washing and at the end of the day making bread from the wheat grown from my neighbors mill I still cannot keep my kitchen clean.

I'm not sure what this has to do with girls camp other than we went and camped and ate Doritos and sloppy joes! I determined once again that most pioneer talents were bred out of my line one generation ago. The canning stopped here! The women running the girls camp had not lost their pioneer gene. I watched in awe at the abundance.