DAYS 45 - 50 - Consolidated Blog for the long weekend

Okay, so I'm cheating a little but I've been away for these past few days and I downed electronic gadgets and contraptions (for the most part) so that I could give my whole self to the people I was spening time with. It's a gorgeous thing to walk away from all the gizmos, bells and whistling contraptions once in a while. It's recalibrating to get back to basics and rely on the art of verbal communication, one-on-one.

We went away camping with my cousins for this Labour Day long weekend. We haven't been camping together for quite a few years, with me anyway. Our respective lives became so busy with 'stuff' that setting aside time to get together around a campfire just hasn't come up. It's been 3 years since The Grampian camp. So we set off to Apollo Bay.

Some of the gang couldn't be there so this year was a different permutation of cousins et alia around the campfire, which adds to the familial soup, if you like. Different flavours always change the way the soup tastes, which is always good.

Having gadgets and gizmos like iPhones and Blackberrys and assorted whatnots are all well and good but there's something to be said about ditching it all for some good ole chinwagging around a campfire. We reminisce about our respective childhoods as we didn't grow up together, sadly. We laugh a LOT! We make each other laugh a LOT!

When we get to our destination, we usually set up a communal gathering place and pitch our tents around it. It's quite symbolic because, to me, our tents represent the outer shell of our lives that protects the inner us which we feel safe to reveal. It's a good place to be.

The nucleus are the cousins and we've now brought our partners and children into the foray. God, all those personalities congregated in one place makes for an interesting experience. We have the spotlight seekers, the introverts, the clowns, the intellects, the mothers, the saviours, the leaders, the followers, the nurses, the nurturers, the Master Chefs, the clueless, the focussed, the quiet, the noisy, the morning people, me (NOT much of a morning person) - some of us also belong to more than one of these categories.

To watch our ever-changing personalities slowly click together and sometimes clash is truly interesting. The group dynamics is so intricately laced with equal parts of love, laughter and acceptance to judgement, annoyance and irritation that it shows us up - individually - for all our human frailties and beauty all in the one package. But that we continue to love, despite and in spite of all these prickles and petals, is a beautiful thing to have in our lives at all.

It's a cacophony of noise and confusion and sounds and I guess that's not what you might picture camping to be all about but when you have a group of 18 or so, as if quietude and serenity is ever going to enter that picture. Get a grip!

We pool our food together and share a smorgasbord of breakfasts which ranges from bacon and eggs done on an open-air BBQ to pancakes and bacon and maple syrup, hot cross buns, cereal, cafe style raisin toast, you name it - it's dealt out hot and delicious to be consumed as a group. We make each other coffee and tea .....ummm, okay....I LET people make me coffee and tea.

We also share lunches made up of sandwiches made with love and "skin juice", wraps filled with deliciously sumptuous fillings like curried chicken mince and chilli beef (Debbie, you rock!!). Our dinners are a veritable cornucopia of gourmet food stuffs that gives everyone the chance to showcase their camping Master cheffery.

Finally, we gather around our campfire with bottles of red wine and port and regale ourselves stupid with stories and jokes until the man across the road comes over and tells us to keep the noise down.

Camping means different things to everyone. For some, it's the opportunity to get away and go back to basics. For others, it's a form of relaxation and change of pace from their normal workaday lives. For others yet again, it's whatever that canvas needs to be to spend time with people they like being with, doing something they wouldn't normally do, but they do it to be near them.

For me, camping is all of these things and more. I love coming home smelling of smoke and earth. I love spending time away from electricity. I love getting as close to nature as I'm comfortable getting and I love being with people who happen to be my friends but are also my family.