by Laurel Michaels

Created on: May 24, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

It's time for our annual family camping trip! Oh joy of joys! Every year I look forward to the fishing, the hiking, the fresh air, the drinking, the adventure, and best of all, the quiet that is uninterrupted by the ring of my cellphone!

It's become a yearly tradition since the summer of 2000. Dad had died the year before and my brother and sister and I wanted to remember him in a more personal way then just the memorial ceremony. Since we had many fond memories of camping with him when we were kids, we decided to sprinkle a handful of his ashes in the woods near one of our favorite childhood campgrounds. That way at least a part of him could rest in a place he was fond of. I remember that first trip we took after he died. My brother drove dad's old station wagon and pop was nestled in the back, between the toilet paper and marshmallow skewers, bouncing around in his urn until we arrived. Good times.

And so we return every year, all of us and our spouses and kids, to unwind, remember dad, and remember that life is short and family is everything. Some years it takes more effort to remember that then others. Like the year my 12 and 14 year old daughters and their friend disappeared minutes after we got to our campsite. They had seen other campers floating down the river on rafts and decided to join them-without telling us. When asked why they went so far downstream they said they thought the river went in a circle and they would wind up back where they started. Not the sharpest tools in the shed, my girls. They confused the Virgin River with a ride at Wet N' Wild. We didn't find them until 3 hours later. We almost turned around and went home after that but once my husband's blood pressure medicine kicked in, we stayed. That was also the year my daughter brought the fart machine. We visited a small nearby town and she had no shame with it. I'm sure the patrons of every store we went into all thought I had raised a mannerless child.

We started out camping in tents. That's how we always did it as kids and I didn't mind tent camping, not even when my daughter woke up the whole campground screaming in the middle of the night because she had a bloody nose, and I couldn't find a flashlight. But then I started dating my now husband, an avid RV fan, and one year we decided to buy an RV. It was forty five hundred dollars and we put about five thousand dollars of work into it. Needless to say, it was not exactly a top of the line coach like you see on travel shows. Ours would

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