Some kids spent their holidays flying to expensive places and buying expensive things. Other kids stayed at home and were boring. Welcome to Real Chat about my family holidays As a child, family holidays usually consisted of days spent in the En-Zed bush living in tents or huts, and carrying ALL the things on our backs. It was fun sometimes, but mostly it was decidedly average. Here are some things about it:
If you had to walk through a river (99% of the time you did), you knew your socks wouldn't be dry the next day. It feels medium because in the morning you can't have a cry about it, because crying won't make your socks dry, and it will probably piss your parents off. I'll tell you something for free: Wet socks are better than no socks. Also, there were always small bits of gravel and shit permanently lodged into the fibers, so it felt even more awesome when you put them on again.
You get so dirty and smelly that you don't even feel dirty and smelly anymore.
Things were quite pretty.
Swing bridges are rad. They swing. They're bridges. I like most bridges. You had to obey the signs that said how many people were allowed on them at a time. If you didn't, you could fully...like...die.
Heaps of friendly people go tramping. Also, lost of weirdos go tramping. My friend, whose family also made her go tramping, told me this one story about how an Israeli guy cut a large hole in a mattress to make a poncho. She then used it as anecdotal evidence as to why every single Israeli person is awful. Hard to say who is worse; her, or the Israeli.
I think tramping really does build character. I used to read Calvin and Hobbes as a child. Calvin's dad always used to ramble about character building. Going tramping would make me feel a little like Calvin, but so much tougher. If he can build character after chilaxing in a tent on a lake for a bit, then I thought 'I'm gonna have so much character after this HELL'.
One time my dad woke up in the middle of the night to chase a possum with a stick. Good on him.
Possum probably would have eaten my face off. Thanks, Steve.
One time, Steve got us lost and we had to climb up a waterfall then slide down this massive scree slope and I actually thought I might die. I think mum thought we were all going to die, too, but she didn't say that at the time. She was quite angry at Steve, but I think that you can only do silent treatment for so long when you are stuck with your husband and three kinds in the middle of actual nowhere.
We consumed a lot of SCROGGIN. For Americans, that's trail mix. (I like 'SCROGGIN' a bit better though, because if I call it 'trail mix' I feel like I have to be on a trail to eat it, also I find it too literal. It's kinda like calling jandels 'flip flops'. How rudimentary is that? Naming something after the noise it makes? We may as well start calling 'cows' 'moos' and 'dogs' 'barks'. Rant over.) If you're a word nerd, you might know that SCROGGIN is an acronym for sultanas, chocolate, raisins, orange peel, glucose, grains, 'imagination', and nuts. What blows my mind now is that Steve had the audacity to put SALTED peanuts in with everything, so it was all just a little salty. That's the dangerous thing about putting 'imagination' into an acronym. You get salted nuts.
One time my brother ate too many dried apricots and he got the shits. We all found that humorous.
Tramping taught me to be impatient with people who complain when we are going for adventures that some people call 'hikes' and I would call 'walks in the park', then I feel like the hugest dick. I also feel this way about people who can't climb up very small hills. This is because I'm not even good at climbing up hills, so if you're worse than me then you probably have issues.
Tramping food tastes better than regular food. Not because it's actually better, but because you're tramping and what else are you even gonna eat?
Mum told us that she was giving us stars for walking well. I was imagining a star chart-type thing, because she said it was a star chart-type thing. We would get given different colour stars for being good at tramping i.e. not complaining, walking fast, singing fewer annoying songs maybe, etc. Thing is, I never saw the star chart, nor did I question the lack of tangible rewards. Life. Lesson. Learnt.
If your parents didn't make you go tramping, then you missed out, but also, not really.
Other thoughts from me:
I still really like that song Irreplaceable by Beyonce. What really gets me about it, though, is that she rhymes 'minute' with 'minute'.
I think I have something like 223,000 websites bookmarked. I don't know what to do. I don't feel okay. I don't even know how to categorize them, and I can't simply delete them all. Too much work has gone into wasting time on the internetz to have nothing to show for it.
On getting naked in front of animals: It feels so wrong, but is it really wrong?
