The Last Camping Trip

It was a long camping trip in the end of the 90’s, and we had been out on the road for several weeks. Some of it was in hotels and with friends and relatives and some was camping. It was mostly a fun vacation, coming from Calgary, Alberta, east and south into the US, around Minneapolis and Chicago making our way to Lake Chautauqua to the family cottage, up to Niagara Falls and back to Calgary.

We had some fun camping experiences in our tent and some disasters, including a mosquito filled evening where my oldest daughter and I ended up very bitten.

On the way home however, we stopped one night in Sauk Center, Minnesota, a lovely town celebrating it’s Sinclair Lewis Festival.

Sauk Centre is a city in Stearns County, Minnesota, United States. The population was 3,930 at the 2000 census. It is the birthplace of Sinclair Lewis, a novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Sauk Centre served as the inspiration for Gopher Prairie, the fictional setting of Lewis's 1920 novel Main Street.

We pulled into the city operated camp ground and were surprised to find a beautiful camping spot by the water with no one in it. We were so pleased, and set up right away. The weather was beautiful but the weather report warned of heavy rainfall. We figured we could weather any storm, had dinner and went to bed.

At about 10:30 I began to float. My sleeping bag was up to the top with water, and the only thing we could manage to do was get up, get on some dry clothing, grab the girls and run for the car leaving everything else sitting in the deluge.

We ran for our lives! We drove into town, and looked at the motels, all with no vacancy signs. The Festival draws a big crowd and everything was full. Downtown there was a newly opened, classic old hotel, from the turn of the century. They had been opened a very short time, and I ran in and got in line and booked the very last room in the plcae. They had a double bed, a cot and my youngest daughter slept on the floor with some sheets, blankets and pillows.

The next morning we made our way back to the campground where everyone else was doing fine. Some neighbors explained that the camp site we had, known to locals, always flooded in a rain storm and no one used it if it looked like rain! You think someone could have said something?

That was the last night we ever camped as a family. I had to promise my wife and my daughters that we would never again get into a tent!

Now, years later, my oldest daughter uses our tent to go camping with her friends!

Go figure.