I started going camping regularly with my dad when I was just five-years-old.
It started with short trips just into the woods behind our house because I was so little, but by nine I was accompanying my father on trips to the state parks in our area.
One of my favorite parts of camping was bonding with my father. We had endless conversations about everything from music to school. Unlike my mother, my dad was a huge music fan and played a number of different instruments in high school like tuba, piano, xylophone, and guitar. He had boxes filled with cassette tapes of various musicians and bands and he started giving me cassettes to listen to when I was just eight-years-old. I developed a strong love for 1970s rock music because of the tapes that I was receiving from my dad. We often listened to them on the car rides to the camping sites and sometimes in our tent after dark with the boombox stereo that we always brought with us wherever we would go. While we don’t live in the coldest climate in the country, it still gets fairly cold in the winter here. Whenever we went on autumn camping trips, my dad always packed the propane powered space heater to use if we ever got too cold. These days I do much more camping in late spring and early summer, but there are times where I’ll go out in fall as long as I have one of those amazing propane powered space heaters with me. They’re fairly straightforward to use if you’re familiar with gas powered appliances and devices.