Confession Friday

“I hate camping…or roughing it on vacation”

I am like the soon-to-be step-mom on “The Parent Trap.”

If I go on vacation I want it to be nice.

Camping is not for me. Yeah, I can do it…no problem…. but not for recreational or relaxing fun.

I put part of the blame on my parents. My sister every year tries to talk me into going with them to Pinecrest. My mom and dad actually met on vacation there. My mom has been going and staying in the same cabin there since she was a baby. They brought my brother and sister all the time.  When i came around they had recently bought their cottage in Carmel, so that is where we went. That is where I spent a lot of my childhood, and all the nostalgia that my sister feels in Pinecrest, I feel in Carmel.

When I was 12 they brought me to Pinecrest. This was too little too late. The cabin we stayed (the same one they had been going for for 50 years) needs a sheet hung over the beds so rats don’t fall on you (or spiders…)….It is freezing, there is carpet with urine stains in the bathroom (around the toilet), and the only source of heating is the stove in the downstairs kitchen (the bedrooms are upstairs)…so some poor soul has to go get it started in the morning. Oh, that summer my mom swam the lake and got a weird parasite from swallowing diminutive amounts of water. I’m now afraid of all lakes, not just that one (which is man-made, and it loses a little of the mystique for me because of that, too…)…

Brian was all for visiting Pinecrest when my sister asked him. Then I poisoned that well by talking in detail about my experience there.