The Great Outdoors

Not much time today as I’m hoping to sneak off early and get on a train to Lucern/Luzern for the weekend. The Golden Shrimp and myself have decided to sample the Swiss outdoors and we’re off camping.

Before I met The GS I had a horrible impression of camping. The only time I’d been camping before that was with the Scouts. And since my Dad was one of the leaders we generally ended up camping in a field behind our house. So I’d wake in the morning, look across the field and I could see my bedroom window.

Of course, it wasn’t the proximity to my comfortable bed and centrally heated house that got to me. It was the eejits I was sharing a tent with. We all got settled into the green canvas tents and were told explicitly to avoid rubbing the inside walls of the tent. They’d been waxed to keep the rain out. You may as well have paid them per square foot of rubbing. By the time the Monaghan monsoon kicked in later that evening we’d have done just as well with a big paper bag over our heads.

I woke the following morning with the bottom half of my sleeping bag submerged, a mild case of hypothermia and a feeling of sea-sickness. Needless to say I wasn’t enamoured by the whole pursuit of camping. But The GS is a seasoned camper and we’ve been a few times since and I’ve come to love it. So the weekend should be good, the weather forecast looks great, the bottle of wine has been packed and we should be on our way just after six.