There are some who have been camping throughout their lives; and there are others who have grown up largely in the suburbs or the city, and whose only experience of camping is a pup-tent in their friend's back-yard, or a trailer on a trailer park. For the latter, camping may not be for you. Yes, there's learning and striving and persevering at it--but it takes time. Its therefore important to know yourself: are you in the camper's camp, or the metro-camp?
Here's how you know you're out of your league when you're invited to go camping:
1. Your experience in the outdoors reveals a yawning gap between age 12 and 41--largely trailer parks and resorts.
2. Your conception of 'roughing it up north' is a 3-star hotel in Barrie.
3. You bring a butane canister to make fire.
4. Wondering how you'll survive without Starbucks, you fret over how many Starbucks instants you must bring with you, and how the whole fire-thing will work out when making it.
5. Losing your butane canister, you wonder if cold lake water and Starbucks instants will slake your migraine.
6. Ignoring the warning to wear water shoes in the lake, you've cut your feet up beyond recognition.
7. Within your first day you suffer a fishing hook cut between your eyes--self-inflicted.
8. Taking fish off the hook is "icky."
9. Eating Yellow Perch is too fishy, and you've almost choked to death several times on the bones.
10. You'd rather just stay indoors all day and play suduko.
11. You've run out of data on your mobile phone within the first day--now you're staring down the barrel of a week without Facebook and it's making you feel totally disconnected from your self.
12. Can't swim--too many water snakes, or just gunky lake floor.
13. Being used to city lights, you head outside at dark and realize after the first few steps that it's "awfully dark" and you don't own a flashlight.
14. You feel best at night when the day's over.
15. You realize upon waking up that you're facing another day of it, asking yourself "Now what?"
16. Your 350 sq. ft. condo on Yonge and Bloor Street, with 3am garbage pick-up and incessant noise, is actually really comfortable.
17. You rush to your vehicle and start the engine just to feel air conditioning--and it's only 23 degrees outside.
18. You feel more human in air conditioning than in the outdoor breeze.
19. Your fingers itch to touch a keyboard and mouse while dreaming of the bliss your homey office cubicle up on the 20th floor of some black monolith of corporate death brings you.
20. You've nothing to wear, for suddenly Diesel Jeans and Abercrombie shirts don't seem to cut it while bushwhacking in the Muskokas.
21. You didn't read the article that Obsession by Calvin Klein, and other colognes and perfumes and essential oils, attract wild cats and other beasts--not the kind of 'catch' you were expecting camping.
22. In spite of meat-glut, you've opted to scarf down Weber's hamburgers the entire time you're there to avoid said Yellow Perch, Small Mouth Bass, and other "icky fish", not to mention the chimera of shopping bliss the whole Webers Roots wear brings.
23. Hacking awkwardly at a piece of flint with your friend's ultra-cool German hunting knife makes you feel so Jeff Probst--repeating the phrase "Fire in the form of flint" a bazillion times to the death-stares of your camping mates.
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