[00:00:00] Camping with kids

Lindsay Porter: I’m done with camping. I told these guys like, “Never again. If you wanna camp, go for it. I will be at the hotel.”

Andrea Marie: We are Moms Unhinged, a nationally touring standup comedy show. Join us in our podcast as we explore everything from motherhood, midlife, crisis, marriage, divorce, online dating, menopause, and other things that irritate us.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Moms Unhinged, the podcast. I’m your host, Andrea Marie, and I am here with the amazing Lindsey Porter calling in from Chicago. Welcome, Lindsey.

Lindsay Porter: Hi.

Andrea Marie: We’re gonna talk today about camping with kids. Oh my gosh. So you guys, if you don’t know, I know not everyone knows all of our comedians, but Lindsey is one of our Chicago-based comedians. She tours around all over with us. She is coming out to Colorado in September.

If you haven’t seen Lindsey on a show yet, you definitely have to see her. She’s so amazing and funny. But I did put out the call to all of our comedians about this topic, camping with kids, and I’m like oh, I guess not a lot of people go camping with kids, as they probably shouldn’t.

Lindsay Porter: It’s a very wise decision. Also, you live in Colorado where there’s mountains, and we don’t really camp where there’s mountains. It’s a little bit different. Midwest camping, I mean, we’ve camped other places, but it’s largely flat. It’s a lot let’s talk about where you camped. ‘Cause I grew up in Chicago, as some people may know, and I would go up to Door County, and yeah, that was a really beautiful place to camp. But where would you go camping?

So for my childhood, we camped a lot, and we camped all over the Midwest in exciting places like Door County, which is actually gorgeous and really cool. But Devil’s Lake.

ever,

Andrea Marie: Devil’s like, “I didn’t ever go there.” Yeah

Lindsay Porter: It was Wisconsin? It a beautiful, beautiful place. We were all over Michigan. As a family, we camped a lot, and I remember once ending up at a place called Willow Slough, which a slough or a slough is basically like a giant swamp, and it was so buggy.

And my parents were like, “We should have looked up slough in the dictionary before we…” It was, this was like the ’70s, where they were like, “Not a good idea to go camping where it’s just a lot of mosquitoes.”

Andrea Marie: It is.

[00:02:35]   Leeches, Toddlers & Other Camping Disasters

Andrea Marie: Yeah, speaking of bad places to go, we took our kids to Leech Lake, and that is not, that is a, that’s actually a thing up in Minnesota.

And yes, there are leeches. So it’s like, “Why are we doing this?”

Lindsay Porter: I did take my kid to a place called Amnicon Falls, my husband and I, and his cousins, and there were leeches. It’s gorgeous. It’s in northern Wisconsin, so probably a very similar, like, kind of geography to Minnesota. And these gorgeous falls, and you can sit in them, and it’s amazing. But then we did notice that we had leeches on us, and I was like…

Of course, at that point I had a phone, and I was like, “You can just take them off of you.” And I was like, “Just pick them off.”

And my son is picking them off. He doesn’t give a crap. He’s like, “Ah, fine.” But then one of his cousins kind of freaked out was like, They suck your blood.” And then there was a lot of screaming and running, and I was like,

“Just a little bit. It’s fine. It used to be medicinal.” It’s pretty.

Andrea Marie: You used to have to pay for this.

Lindsay Porter: That’s right. It’s sucking the bad humors out of you or whatever.

Andrea Marie: Yeah, right. Oh my gosh, that’s so funny. I know just, if you just don’t think about it, don’t think about… I mean, you know, mosquitoes suck your blood too, so we’ve got it.

They’re just water mosquitoes.

They’re just slimy water mosquitoes.

Lindsay Porter: When I think about us camping with my son like, they’re always the worst stories are from the camping trips, but they’re also the most memorable. So I’m like, and they’re so fun. They’re, it’s so terrible, camping is so terrible in the moment sometimes, but like the most, the best memories.

Andrea Marie: Yeah, for sure. We took my kids camping, when they were well it was my son, my oldest son. I don’t know what we were thinking. It was me. I know. It’s always me instigating some of these things. And yeah, and I just wanted to go to this beautiful lake. So we took him camping.

He was only two, and he, you know, they’re used to a nightlight. And so it was every hour on the hour he woke up screaming. And, we were in this campsite, beautiful and, well I think it was Weldona Lake or some lake up in the mountains. And, the campsites were pretty close together.

So every hour on the hour he’s just screaming night, you know, bloody murder. And we would have to try and quiet him down, quiet him down. He’s like, “It’s too dark. It’s too dark,” you know, and And then we were trying to like, have a flashlight, but that was really bright. And, you know, it just was a totally bad decision on how early to take him camping. So that was not good.

Lindsay Porter: Yeah. Well, we had a similar experience where most of our camping we did like, my sister’s in-laws own a gorgeous place up in northern Wisconsin with like, 180 acres and their own lake. So a lot of our camping was done in like, we did it in my parents’ backyard out in the suburbs, but they have like five acres and a barn.

So it was a lot of, it was like, you’re gonna camp, but there’s a bathroom.

Andrea Marie: Yeah.

Lindsay Porter: We kind of were vacation moochers. We had friends who had much nicer like, parents with vacation homes, and we would pitch a tent in their yard. So, but we took him to like a regular campsite when he was really little. Similar thing happened that in a distant campsite you could hear a dog barking, And all night long it’s, “Mommy, Daddy, doggy go bow-wow. Doggy go wow-wow.” And he’s like, screaming it, and we’re like three feet away from the neighbor’s tent.

Andrea Marie: Oh man. Yeah. it’s just a weird, and it takes so long to get prepared to camp. You know, you’re just before like camping sounds good, and then I’m spending the entire day getting ready to camp. If you just camp one night, it just feels like two days of prep and recovery for one day of camping it’s really.

Lindsay Porter: And then the packing everything, and then the setup, which is invariably like one adult having to do like all of the tent poles and everything while the kid needs to go to the bathroom and, you know, it’s just, yeah, it’s kind of a nightmare for sure.

Andrea Marie: But you, it sounds like you grew up camping. Did you grow up?

Lindsay Porter: Oh yeah. And the highlight of our camping trips… Okay, there was one time when we took like a 10-day camping trip up in the UP of Michigan. And I have a sister and a brother, I’m the oldest.

[00:07:14] The Camping Stories Our Families Still Tell

Lindsay Porter: My brother was like four years old. So we spent, you know, a long time. It was gorgeous. I have great memories of this trip.

But my brother was peeing outside all the time. So we went up to Mackinac Island.

Or some, it might be Mackinac, I can’t remember.

Andrea Marie: I know it’s both. It’s both.

Lindsay Porter: Don’t yell at me in the comments. I can’t remember. But it’s gorgeous, and they have a big fancy hotel up there called The Grand Hotel. And so we were all, we’d been camping for 10 days, we’re all in our grubby clothes, and my mom is like, “Let’s go to The Grand Hotel.”

So we go, and my brother, who’s four, unzips his pants , unzips his pants, and pees in the bushes in front of The Grand Hotel. I mean, this is a beautiful hotel. This is where like presidents stay. It’s so fancy. We went, we tried to go a few years ago. It was like $700 a night. We’re like, “We’re not going there.”

So yeah, that was a thing that happened on a trip. And my dad had a tradition that I loved, and I try, I did it with my son too. He created a character called Little Brunhilda, who was a little girl whose parents were trying to eat her. But she was a very good girl, and she did whatever they said.

And at the end of every camping trip, he would tell a story about Little Brunhilda and her best friend, the little girl with a cigar in her mouth.

And they all of the stories would be based on things that we had done, and they would mostly be about how she escapes being eaten by her parent. I don’t know.

We loved them. We probably should work it out in therapy, but we really looked forward to these stories. And then I tried to do it with CJ, my son, and he was a little less enthusiastic. Maybe I wasn’t as good a storyteller. My dad was a great storyteller.

Andrea Marie: Oh, that’s so.

What a great memory. That’s so awesome. Yeah.

Lindsay Porter: Yeah, so I had really good memories of my childhood camping and was trying to recreate it with my son, sometimes my sister and her kids.

 We did have an epic family vacation where we decided to do some winter camping.

Andrea Marie: Oh.

Lindsay Porter: It was like November, and the night before was absolutely gorgeous. It was like a 70-degree November night. And we went to the suburbs of Chicago, like the south suburbs, with some friends, where they actually you’re camping.

But they have, these cabins. They’re unheated, but you’ve got a bed. And there’s, there’s no bathroom in them. You have to go to, like, a bathhouse.

Andrea Marie: Right

Lindsay Porter: But the rest of it is like, you’re at like, a sort of campsite. And well, it went from 70 degrees to like, 29.

Andrea Marie: My gosh. Yeah.

Lindsay Porter: And it was the coldest, most miserable trip.

And it was actually a beautiful place, but all the leaves had fallen off, and we were actually just in the Chicago suburbs, not really out anywhere. And in the distance, you could see the light of a bar, all the adults were like, “Can we just leave the bar? Can we just go to the bar?” My friend is a wonderful cook, and she brought like, meat to defrost, and we were gonna make kebabs over the grill, and it was so cold the meat wouldn’t defrost, so we had to just order a pizza. Like the delivery guy showed up at the campsite.

Andrea Marie: I’m probably like, “What are you doing out here?”

Lindsay Porter: It was so terrible. All of the adults snored. So none of the kids could sleep. We did a more drinking than we probably should have. We weren’t, no one was driving. It was just ’cause it was so cold.

Andrea Marie: Yeah. What are you gonna do?

Lindsay Porter: My son still remembers it, like, “Remember the worst trip we ever took?”

But it was, kind of fun. I mean, there was a lot of laughing, but it was totally miserable.

Andrea Marie: We had something similar where we, every year we would go up with my church group who would… and it was, great because I loved going as a group because then, you know, you’ve, you forget the paper towels, someone else has them. You know, so you don’t think about something, someone else has a cool way to make coffee, you know, or whatever it is.

And so we would go up every year into the mountains, we’d pick a different spot, it was always fun ’cause the kids would all just go off and build some sort of wooden fort. Well, one year it just rained all day, all day raining, and we’re just trapped in these little tents. We did have, some people had like, kinda shade spots that we could be in, but it was raining so hard it was, like, coming in the sides.

So, you know, we were just huddled in these two like, you know, areas, and the adults just were drinking. We were just like, “I don’t know what else to do?”

Lindsay Porter: You’re like, we have houses. We have homes.

Andrea Marie: Why are we doing this?

Lindsay Porter: They like protect us from the elements. They’re really comfortable. Like, why aren’t we hanging out there? Which was a thing that I learned ’cause, you know, I became a mom at 42, so I was like, you know, in My 50s with a young kid, and I was like, “I am done sleeping on the ground.”

But that’s why it was great to do like, camping at my sister’s in-laws place because we would send the children out to camp in the yard, and all the adults would be inside.

And we would check on them. You know, we could go out and that was, that was good.

Andrea Marie: That’s perfect.

Lindsay Porter: I like that camping.

[00:12:36] When “Camping” Isn’t Really Camping

Andrea Marie: I know, I love the story about how you could see the light from the bar. My very first, that’s so, that’s so awesome. My very first camping experience, my parents didn’t camp. I didn’t grow up camping. I loved the idea of it.

And so when I was, I think I was about 10 or 11, I think I was, in sixth grade, I got invited to go camping with a friend of mine in the neighborhood, and I was so excited. I was like, “Oh my gosh, yes, I wanna go camping.” And I was picturing, you know, woods and you know, just roughing it out there. And so we go camping, and it turns out to be driving, I don’t know, I think it was like, maybe 30 minutes away, to a Jellystone RV

Lindsay Porter: Oh.

Andrea Marie: With it just all was concrete by the side of a highway. And the dad set up his TV and just watched TV the whole time. And we went into, we did go into the little.

Lindsay Porter: Did you have an RV?

Andrea Marie: Yeah, it was an RV? It was, they had an RV. I don’t remember much about sleeping in the RV. We may have been, like, in a tent right next to it or something. But my friend and I did go into the little rec room area and play pool, so that was my camping experience.

Lindsay Porter: And where you’re like like shooting pool and playing craps and gambling.

And oh by the side of the highway, you know… It was like a very wholesome trip for a child. That’s great.

Andrea Marie: Right. Right. That’s so funny.

Lindsay Porter: We did a camping trip when I was a kid. We went to Disney World when it first was brand new, and they had this amazing campground. And my parents didn’t particularly love camping. It was just less expensive with a bunch of kids, And they loved to travel, so you know, we would do it.

Andrea Marie: It makes a lot of sense.

Lindsay Porter: Remember my dad loved it because they had a cart that came by in the morning that had hot tea, hot coffee, snacks, and newspapers. And we loved it because they played Disney movies outside every night, and they had like, a big swimming hole, and they had very nice bathrooms. It was basically like camping, but barely.

Andrea Marie: Yeah, much nicer.

Lindsay Porter: Glamping, before they called it.

Andrea Marie: Yeah, right, right. And then would you go to Disney during the day?

Lindsay Porter: Then we went to Disney during the day, and that way we could like kind of, you know, afford to take three kids to Disney, ’cause you didn’t need.

Andrea Marie: Right, it’s so expensive. And you’re never in, you’re not even in the hotel. You know, you’re not even there. So why not, yeah, why not camp and do it much cheaper? That’s so, so smart. So smart.

[00:15:22] Canoes, Bird Vegas & Kids Being Kids

Lindsay Porter: Well, my husband took my son on a one-night camping trip up in northern Wisconsin on the Namekagon River, which is absolutely gorgeous. We were staying at the, you know, the cabin with the family, and they took… CJ must have been about seven or eight, and his cousin is a year older, and they took the boys on a canoe trip.

And it was, like, canoeing all day, and then sleeping at a campsite, and then canoeing all day the next day. And he liked canoeing, but for like, a couple hours. Not for like, eight hours. So he liked the part where they camped and swam. The river’s absolutely beautiful up there. It’s completely untouched. You see all this nature.

It’s just gorgeous. But apparently, when they got back ’cause they had a canoe out for, out to like, take them there and get them back, my

eight-year-old son ran to the banks of the river and started kissing the ground and going, “Land. Thank God almighty, land.”

He’s 19 now, and he recently said he’d be willing to try it again ’cause now he thinks he could do, like, eight hours in a canoe, but he was just too young.

He was bored out of his mind. It was too long.

Andrea Marie: Right. It’s so true. We forget how, how much kids get bored with just the same kind of thing. You know? the it’s just, It is hard to remember that you need it, need things to be a little more age appropriate.

So we went when I was still in Chicago, I was working with our youth group at our church, and we took all the kids from the youth group, they were all in high school, up to the Boundary Waters, and that was.

Lindsay Porter: Oh, yeah.

Andrea Marie: Definitely more appropriate time.

But still, it’s tough. It is hard work. Like, you’re paddling all day. Yeah, we were, yeah, we were doing the portaging where th- you know, one time I think we had a mile long portage, and so it’s pretty intense.

Lindsay Porter: Intense. Yeah, we’ve got a lot of campers in my family. My brother has done the Boundary Waters. He had a horrifying experience when he was 18 up there with a friend where they got lost. They lost their canoe for like three days, and a helicopter had to come try and find them. Anyway, that was a crazy thing that yeah.

But my sister’s kids are big readers, so, they always would, when we’d go on these canoe camping trips, they would always bring books. My kid is more of a gamer kid. Maybe a comic book. But I remember getting, you were talking about getting ready for a camping.

Andrea Marie: Yeah.

Lindsay Porter: My sister’s kids were getting ready.

Every kid got a dry bag, you know, like the Ziploc that keeps everything dry, and you’re supposed to put your most important stuff in there. That’s where the adults put their cell phones.

And she was yelling at them. She’s like, “You can only bring one book on this trip. You can’t use all the dry bags for your books.”

was like, what kind of a …And then her son is like, “But what if I finish one book and I wanna read another book?” And she’s like, “One book.”

Lindsay Porter: So I wish I had a kid that wanted to read so much that he needed multiple dry bags for his books on the trip. But that’s not my kid.

Andrea Marie: That is hilarious.

Lindsay Porter: When you take nerds camping.

Andrea Marie: Yeah, yeah, my kids just like going off and, you know, kind of gathering, you know, sticks and whatever and whatnot. They would build a little, it was always fort building. You know, that’s what they would do is just drag sticks.

Lindsay Porter: Yes. I love that.

Andrea Marie: Into a little fort area.

Lindsay Porter: Yeah, when we weren’t confined to a river, that would happen. We went up to a beautiful place in Michigan near Ludington, on Lake Michigan, and we were camping out up there with family. And there’s a whole area where you can walk through all of this grassland and dunes, and there’s lots of trees there and tons of birds.

And CJ was very entrepreneurial as a child, and he started taking, he called it Bird Vegas, sort of like Las Vegas. And he was taking random people on tours of, he was standing there with a bucket and you could tip him. And he was like, “Tours of Bird Vegas.” He was, like, nine years old. And it was, no one had really explored this area very much, and there was a lot of cool stuff in there.

So he literally was getting people were paying him. Like, adults were paying him like, five bucks for this kid to take them up and down these dunes on a path through these trees to a different way to the beach. And I think he made, like, $15 this one day. So, you know.

Andrea Marie: Smart. That’s like, that’s good money. That’s good money.

Lindsay Porter: It was great. And then once on the same beach trip, he was very into making money at that point, and he decided to start miming. He’d never had a mime class. But he did also put out his bucket, and I think he made, like, $4 as a mime.

So, I now consider him a professional mime. But that’s how he livened up our camping trips, was by finding ways

to make, finding ways to make money.

Andrea Marie: That is hilarious. That’s so good. Oh, I love that. We kind of graduated more to cabins. after… I mean, we still did camping, but we really did prefer the cabins you know, that.

Lindsay Porter: Oh, please.

[00:20:49] Why We’ll Never Camp Again

Andrea Marie: Yeah. and especially, like you, like you said, it is so much cheaper. And when they’re, when they are young, like I just found that we were, you know, thing, money was, a little tighter, whatever.

When they’re, it just, due to, all the different circumstances, so camping was great. But then, you know, as soon as we could make a little money, we graduated to cabins. And we would go, every year we’d go to these cabins in Michigan on this whole little area, and it was near the dunes, so it was just a really fun place to go, ’cause that was kind of our beach, “You know, that was, that was really great.

And we would meet some other friends there, and they would get cabins and so it was, it was a really nice way to, vacation. But one year, we did this for, like, 16 years in a row, and about halfway through doing this we were looking around, and all of a sudden I noticed, I’m like, “You guys, these cabins are actually mobile homes, so we are vacationing in a trailer park.”

How white, how white trash is, that?

Lindsay Porter: Once again, when you have, you actually own a home.

Andrea Marie: Uh huh.

Lindsay Porter: And you decide to go live on the street or in a, you know.

Andrea Marie: Yeah.

Lindsay Porter: Wanna be connected to those roots of living off the land, but.

Andrea Marie: Yeah.

Lindsay Porter: I’m done with camping. I told these guys like, “Never again. If you wanna camp, go for it. I will be at the hotel.”

Andrea Marie: Right. I know. It is, it is rough. It’s a lot of, there’s a lot of bugs. The ground is rough. I can never bring enough, I mean, you know, just having enough cushions for sleeping or whatever, you know? All of a sudden you’ve got a cot or whatever. But it sounds like your parents camped late, late into their.

Lindsay Porter: They were young when they had us, so you know, they were 25 when I was born, and I was 42 when my kid was born. So pretty different. And we did, we had a pop-up.

You know, we had the like pop-up thing, and it was the two parents, the three kids, and our giant 100-pound dog, Ralph. And I remember at night my dad would snore, and then Ralph would snore, and then my dad would snore, and Ralph would.

It was just like back and forth. And my sister and I slept on… it was like the kind that pops out and there’s two sides. My mom and dad were on one side, my sister was on the other, and my brother was little, and he slept like on some sort of cot or something. And the dog slept on the floor.

And I remember that this was like the old 1970s kind of camper so that there were buttons basically that you snapped it together.

Multiple times, I fell out in my whole sleeping bag out of the side onto the ground, outside.

And they had to like knock on the door to get back in the camper. But my mother was like, “Oh, you’re fine. You’re fine.”

Did you hit your head?” ” No.”

Andrea Marie: Go back to bed. Get, “

Lindsay Porter: Okay. “Go back to Go back to bed.”

Andrea Marie: You know? My family didn’t camp, so I also went camping with another friend of mine who they, did have a camper, like that with the pop-out sides, and we would go up to Door County with them. And I went a few years in a row with them, which was really fun.

I really enjoyed it. They had other family members who would come, and, we’d sing around the campfire, and you know, the dad played banjo and guitar. it, was really such a, such great memories. One year, a bat got into the camper, and I just remember just, you know, screams in the middle of the night with this thing flapping around, and the dad just yelling and yelling to try and get it out.

And then you’re, like, all hyped up. You’ve just fight or flight mode, and now you’re have, you have to try and go back to sleep at 2:00 in the morning.

Lindsay Porter: Yeah. It’s, once again, most of the things that you remember of camping are the bad, are the bad parts. Yeah, we lived through it makes you appreciate your house.

Andrea Marie: Right. I mean, I always love the saying that I say all the time is, “You don’t tell stories about the things that go right.”

Lindsay Porter: This is true. This is true. This is why we have to go camping, you know?

Andrea Marie: Camping will give you lots, lots, and lots of stories. Oh my gosh. Well, Lindsay, this was just so much fun, so much fun talking about camping.

And, if you’re listening, share your camping stories with us in the comments, wherever you are watching this. You know, we’d love to hear more about camping gone wrong because it makes us all feel like we’re not

We’re doing okay. Yeah, thanks so much, Lindsay. Bye everyone.

Lindsay Porter: I

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