When City Girls Go Camping

Some people just aren't built for the outdoors. Me and my girlfriends are those kind of people. We don't climb trees, we don't like bugs or grass stains and it's always hotter than we would like. We can't set up a tent or start a fire and we get freaked out by leaves rustling around the tent. However, what we lack in ability, we make up for in willingness to try new things.

Camping is one of those things. Our first job was to build a tent. How city girls build a tent is through trial an error. If you've ever attempted to set up a tent, you know there are all sorts of components to keep track of. The body, the pins, the poles. It's all a big mess of parts when it comes out of the bag. What we learned the hard way is that a tent can't be set up on sloped ground. After a few days, it looked like it had been through a hurricane and to this day, I'll never know how it didn't collapse on us. Another lesson in tent building is that if you think it looks a little lopsided but "sturdy enough," it probably isn't. You definitely want to put everything together and be confident in its integrity. If not, you'll probably have to start all over when the whole thing falls to the ground with a condescending sigh.

Once shelter was taken care of, we had to worry about warmth before nightfall. Every camping trip needs a good bonfire. City girls know nothing about how to build a bonfire. First of all, the kindling must be dry. You can use a blowtorch on a green branch and it still won't light up. To us, all you needed was a few sticks and a match. But of course a good bonfire is pretty complicated. There's logs or something similar that will burn long and warm, then smaller sticks that must be angled just the right way to maintain the flame. And then you need tiny twigs and dry materials that will light easily. After creating the perfect combination of the above, we had our fire. It wasn't anything spectacular and it went out on its own after a few hours but it was good enough for s'mores and conversation.

Often along with camping comes other outdoorsy activities like fishing or canoeing.

City girls can't fish. We pull the line as soon as feel any little thing. We put the wrong bait on the hook and we get discouraged if we haven't caught a 15 pound fish after 10 minutes. And if we had caught one, we would have needed at least four of us to reel it in, and in all likelihood we would have dropped the fishing pole into the water. Lets just say it's a good thing we brought sandwiches.

Canoeing down a river seems like a nice relaxing activity. But what we didn't know was that rowing is hard. It hurts and it's not easy to move the canoe in the right direction. City girls on a canoe will spend four hours doing a five mile run that's supposed to take two hours. Paddle too much to one side and you'll end up going in zigzags down the river going back and forth from bank to bank. And if there were any little rocks jutting out of the water, we would hit them dead on, no matter how hard we tried to avoid them.

After a couple of days, we were dying to get back to traffic and high rises, where our shelter is already built and our food is ready for consumption in refrigerators and pantries. I don't know if I would do it again, but if I had to go back, I would make sure that I was aware beforehand that coolers of food left unattended get pillaged by raccoons.