Our First and Last Camping Trip

My mother and father planned out the trip for weeks. Mom gathered foods that we could easily pack and carry. Dad went to a friend and borrowed a large family tent, sleeping bags, lantern, large metal cooler and a Coleman two burner camp stove. The car was packed from trunk to glove box with we three girls sitting in the back seat on an unrolled sleeping bag with our pillows, books and a stuffed toy or two. We were off on our first real family vacation.
The first leg took us to Northern Maine and a stay at the home of Dad's maternal uncle. Dad showed us the area where he had grown up. We went on a car tour to see the small school building where he had attended school as a small child.
Our excitement grew as we prepared to head to Canada. After hours of travel we stopped at the border. My parents were questioned and we traveled through. We were in another country. This was a little mind boggling for we girls. It looked exactly like Maine. Part of our adventure was the promise that we would go fishing at some point on the trip. We were heading from the northernmost point of Maine, into New Brunswick, Canada, traveling east to the St. Johns River, Grand Falls, then down to Harvey Station where Dad's paternal aunt and uncle lived.
Mom and Dad noticed a sign for fishing licenses and he pulled the car over to a small building on a street in a
French Canadian town. Mom went into the building. We could see her through a large plate glass window. Immediately we knew that she had a challenge. The proprietor could not understand her. He spoke French only.
"Just watch your mother." Dad spoke up when we expressed worry. Dad was snickering when Mom began waving her hands in the air in an attempt to show the man what she needed. "She always talks with her hands. She can make anybody understand her", Dad quipped. We girls sat giggling as we watched the show. In less than ten minutes Mom was back in the car with a temporary fishing license.
Mom and Dad had somehow learned of a campground in those days before Internet trip planning and we pulled in to a spot during the early evening. The car was unloaded and the tent was pitched. There were other campers but it was as if our little family was alone in the world. It was exhilarating and frightening at once for me.
Dad pulled out that borrowed camp stove. He set it up on a picnic table and began to figure out how to start it.
Mom was pulling out food and we would have our first camper cooked meal on the big trip. Suddenly there was a swoosh sound. I can still picture it after nearly forty years. There stood my father highlighted by the towering red and orange flames from that camper stove. My head tipped back slowly as my eyes raised to see flames shooting straight up a good twenty feet into the trees in that Canadian campground. We had good laughs about it later but my thought at the moment was that Dad was about to catch Canada on fire and there were campers watching us. Dad was a law officer. Did they arrest people for setting a campground on fire? My parents moved swiftly to stifle the fire. We had a cold supper that night on our big camping adventure. We moved on the next day.
I can smile as I look back on the trip our parents took us on that summer. We connected with our family members in Canada and saw our parents in a whole new light, a flaming one for my father.