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People's thoughts of "roughing it" with camping can vary as much as a highway traveler's choice about whether to stay in a dank, dingy hole-in-the-wall hotel for a night, or stay at a Hilton. How people interpret what a shelter is might vary just as much. Depending on how you choose to sleep in the outdoors, or how fate chooses for you, can also mean the difference between roughing it, and camping in relative elegance. Invariably, a lot of what is called "roughing it" comes down to one's own philosophical interpretation of the whole experience of being in the outdoors.

Roughing it outdoors can mean sleeping on the ground in your clothes, or it can mean sleeping in one of the latest geodesic design tents made of rip-stop 80 denier fabric, with double wall construction, windows, carbon fiber poles, polyurethane coating, double-stitched seams, a vestibule, and a bathtub floor. Some people enjoy being as close to nature as possible and therefore don't even want to sleep in a tent. Others might sleep only in a tent in the outdoors and that is as close to "roughing it" as they want to get.

In over 40 years of pursuing outdoors activities, I have experienced both ends of the extremes. Fortunately, my outdoors experiences began when I was young, so I learned at an early age how to enjoy the outdoors beyond just "sleeping in a tent." From humble beginnings, my experiences grew beyond mere camping to having some truly rough adventures.

When I was a child, my family started taking camping trips when I was about eight years old. In those days, my brothers and I thought we were proud to have the cheesy, leaky pup tent over our heads that we had. Money was tight and that was the best my dad could afford. My brothers and I didn't know any better, thankfully, and we had a wonderful time. While we were out there, we thought we were living like pioneers. And when I say "out there," we car-camped, pulling up to the site in our 1964 Ford Fairlane, unloading everything right where we were going to camp. This was during the days of the Davy Crockett television show, so we welcomed an opportunity to live like we thought he might have, without the car and the other modern trappings, of course. We considered car camping as roughing it then, but little did I know that I would change my opinion in the years to come.

When I got a few years older and a little more experienced with the outdoors, I joined the Boy Scouts with my brothers. The troop we joined was a little more hardcore than most

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