Family Camping Trip (Imperfect Adventures)
However challenging these strange times are, I’ve become even more aware that adventures don’t have to be perfect to be worthwhile. For an upcoming webinar about photo essays, I’m sharing some stories about “imperfect adventures”.
As the kids grow older it’s increasingly hard to get everyone together, even for just a couple of days. The ever changing Covid19 measures made it even harder to organise a little family summer holiday. It took a lot of creative scheduling, rescheduling, rerescheduling and rererescheduling, but we managed to get the gang together for a couple of days of camping in the Ardennes.
Somehow we managed to squeeze all this stuff and a bunch of people into my car.
Over the years, we’ve acquired an eclectic collection of tents.
It’s not easy to find an activity that all the kids like, but an adventure park is always a good choice.
We always aim to do some activities with the whole bunch but there’s no point in forcing it. So we often split up in ever changing little groups for micro adventures but we always end up all together around a campfire.
In case you’re wondering were we went, we’ve set up camp near Lac De La Gileppe in the Southeast of Belgium.
In the past I probably would have seen this trip as a bit of a failure for me as a dad. After all, isn’t the summer vacation supposed to be expensive, at least 2 weeks long and in a spectacular exotic environment? But the forced limitations made me remember what a holiday is really about: it’s about quality family time, exploring and enjoying life. And we had plenty of that.