Camping Toilet Seat

Thre's a way to get everyone to enjoy camping

Summer’s here and the camping is easy…

Yeah, right.

You might have gleaned from previous pieces I’ve written that I’m no fan of camping. In fact, if given the choice to camp or take a calculus exam, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a satisfactory decision. (You might have also gleaned from previous columns that my math skills came to a grinding halt in Mrs. Harcharik’s fourth-grade math class. Thank goodness she mercifully allowed me to write an essay about Albert Einstein in order to make up for my lackluster year-end grade. Didn’t help me to ever learn to balance a checkbook, however.)

Back when my husband and I were dating, he decided he wanted to make a believer out of me in the camping department. I’d grown up as a beach baby, vacationing with sun, surf and sand when I went on holiday. The idea of roughing it in a tent in the woods during vacation never arose in my childhood.

Well, there was that time my Girl Scout troop was supposed to camp for a weekend, only to be thwarted by flooding from Hurricane Agnes. Instead we did a day-trip and were forbidden from using the latrines because poisonous snakes were floating around in them. Yep, camping didn’t present much in the way of charms with that red flag.

But my husband came up with a snake-free plan that entailed us camping amidst the rugged coastal beauty of Acadia National Park in Maine — how could we go wrong? Well, we erroneously arrived a day early for our reservation. On Independence Day weekend. Nary a campsite to be found. (A day earlier in Freeport we were told the only place to stay in all of coastal Maine due to holiday crowds would be a display tent at the LL Bean store . Seriously.)

Luckily, the park ranger was able to come up with a lone campsite that had been abandoned by some early departers. After setting up the borrowed ancient tent (I was warned not to touch the canvas as any place you’d touch would leak if it rained — good luck there), we cooked steaks over the grill, made s’mores and basked in our happy camper experience, just a little smug we were able to nab a campsite so late despite our scheduling error.

After once more admiring the breathtaking canvas of stars in the clear night sky, we zipped the tent closed for the night. I set my book down next to my pillow as I was falling asleep — then several hours later woke to it floating away from me. Turns out a storm had come in, and the aged tent leaked in approximately, oh, two million places. And our campsite was at the bottom of a flood plain.

What is a Camping Toilet?

I’m a girl. I can sleep on the ground. It’s okay even if I don’t get to take a hot shower. But one thing I have an absolutely hard time tolerating is answering nature’s call by simply digging a hole and squatting. It’s just not…right. It just doesn’t make me feel good.That was one of my greatest pet peeves when I used to go camping with my parents as a kid. It made me feel no better than the pets we had at home. Thankfully, camping design and technology has greatly evolved since then and we now have numerous, modern, and human-appropriate camping toilets. Further, we actually have several options to choose from. How great is that?!!!