Late Spring 1963
A family of five piles into an Opel wagon with sleeping bags and grocery bags full of supplies, heading from Janesville to Dodgeville for their very first camping trip—where a hot hay field and a poorly ventilated tent quickly teach them what no one mentioned at Homemakers Club.
Late Spring 1963 Our first camping experience. Mom belonged to a "Homemakers Club" that met at the church. There were a number of the members who were campers and got us interested in camping. So we bought four sleeping bags, one each for Mom, me, Karen and Sam. We decided that Lynn did not need her own bag as she could sleep with us. We rented a basic tent and we took off. We piled our stuff very loosely into the Opel wagon. We had most of our things and supplies in grocery bags. We soon found that was not very smart because we couldn't find anything. We drove out of Janesville to Dodgeville. We found a small county campground and started to set up our campsite. The site was under some trees, but it was next to a hay field that they had just mowed. The weather was hot and the mowed field made it feel even more uncomfortable. I don't remember what we did for supper but somehow, we managed and then set up for the night. Everyone settled in but there were several things that we had not planned on. The first was the tent did not have much ventilation when we got inside. The second was that the windows rolled up on the outside and we found that this is a big disadvantage. During the night we had a heavy thunderstorm and the rain started coming in. I had to run outside to untie the flaps before we all got drenched. The third was that Lynn decided to walk up my back for most of the night. We did survive but we knew that we had to make some changes. Lynn would get her own sleeping bag and we would buy a much more practical tent. We knew that the next time it would be better.
Our next trip was much closer to home. Just before the Memorial Day weekend, Karen and I went out to Whitewater Lake to check out some of the sites. We found two sites and I left Karen on the sites while I went to make some reservations. I booked them both because we had heard that our friends the Schultz family, who were veteran campers, were planning to go camping that weekend. We called them when we got back home and they decided to come along with us. This was a very good thing for us because they were very experienced and we learned a lot. Immediately upon our return I built the "Yellow Box" camping kitchen that we used for many years. Things looked up from that point on and really turned us into very enthusiastic future campers.
