We’ve heard of people doing it. We’re tough. We’re good parents. Why shouldn’t we take our 13-month old camping?

Let me tell you the reasons:

    1. Unless you book a campsite six months out in the PNW, you’re stuck with some pretty bad campgrounds. Memaloose State Park, sandwiched between railroad tracks and an interstate (LOUD, and nowhere to even walk), and designed to be a slightly more natural Walmart parking lot (no privacy), is a pretty bad campground.
    2. Daylight is roughly 6am-9pm this time of year. I’m sure there are exceptions, but kids don’t sleep in the light.
    3. Our first diaper change set the stage for things when it was an unexpected poop, she squirmed and ran, smearing it all over the tent. Lesson: don’t do diaper changes in the tent!
    4. Our neighbors had apparently been multi-night stayers, a ranger wrote them a note mid-day, but they didn’t arrive until late. Curious, I read the note, which was a notice of quiet hours – apparently they had been loud until 3am the previous night. When they arrived and laughed at it, our expectations were set.
  1. Apparently 7pm is a good time for flying your pair of sea planes up and down the Gorge for at least an hour. While we were within a couple hundred yards of the Gorge and could get a decent view of it, those train tracks meant we had no access. All the negatives, none of the positives.
  2. It began to rain.

With Mia wailing from 6:30 to 9 or so, we packed it up and arrived home at 10:30pm. For the foreseeable future, camping will be in yurts, cabins, or really secluded places; we simply don’t love it enough.

All was not a loss. We learned some good lessons, and managed a fantastic rest of the day in Hood River with friends.