Camping Insights
- Clara Raven
- Jul 24
- 3 min read
It's all very well going camping as a child, as everything is taken care of and you can just run about a field, barefoot, wild and free. From a teenager onwards, as a woman, though, you have to worry about whether your period will come along on holiday with you. The potential humiliation or dread of leaking blood onto your only pair of trousers that you packed or into your sleeping bag. When you reach menopause, there is the palaver of applying HRT gel onto your inner thighs and then having to wait ten minutes until it has dried off, before you can put your bottoms on.
The trouble with this is that if you are in a communal changing room and someone is waiting to use the shower, so you have to come outside and stand by the sink while it dries off or you'll be in shower cubicle for twenty minutes. The embarrassment is that you are still in just your knickers, brushing teeth and putting on make-up, while getting the side eye and minds wondering why you are only half dressed. I have tried just putting my trousers straight back on afterwards to avoid being judged but ended up waddling up the camping field like John Wayne, fresh off his horse.
It is a few years now since I have done proper camping - sleeping on an airbed that goes down in the night - and standing over it crying, wondering why I chose to do this of my own free will. The past few years, instead, I have enjoyed staying on campsites but sleeping in a campervan. This means, there is a proper mattress and a door which shuts and locks, rather than canvas billowing in the wind. My husband decided that the mattress we have isn't quite comfortable enough, so invested in two single padded airbeds to place on top. This is all very well, until you park up in a spot that the spirit level doesn't agree with and it's too late to put the chocks under the wheels, if you land at your campsite late at night. We both end up sliding off the 'princess and the pea' mattresses, into one another or worse, head down towards the half full potty below.
On the plus side, there is less to do in a campervan, over being at home, as being in a much smaller space means no housework. Woohoo. Van work takes minutes - it would take longer if I was a stylist or not such a grime-monger but it is a pretty chilled way to travel and live for a while. Cooking on the outside stove, washing up in my pretty, pink bowl, hanging up clothes to dry on a line and smoothing down the sleeping bags ready for bedtime.
Some of my favourite things about van life are gazing out of the window at beautiful scenery, listening to favourite tunes, stopping off for lunch at a cove along the way or to have a stretch, having a dip in a lake or the ocean, walking along golden beaches and cosy evenings spent watching the sun go down around a fire. Ten days is my max now though. After then, everything is sandy underfoot, starts to smell and feel a bit damp - especially us and our wet dog, and then we feel like returning to civilisation and the domestic bliss of home.
Where we stayed: