My dad was in the reserves shortly before I was born.   This is a small picture of him I have in my files.  I think it’s the only one I have of him in uniform. I remember my dad never wanting to camp out and he would tell stories about finding snakes in your boots when he was in the reserves.  His other comment was always “We live in the woods, why would we want to go sleep in it”.

I’m still not big on camping, as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that as a child we had plenty of chances to practice camping out.  Storms where we had no power for a week. No power meant no water, no water meant no toilets.  Living in a subdivision there is nothing like living in the country.  Even when the power goes out we can flush the toilets and run water.  Imagine having to melt snow to get water to flush the toilet.  Even the camping sites I’ve seen now have access to regular bathrooms.

Now my parents have a generator, but I remember my dad doing his best to work around by hooking a tractor up in some way to run a few little things.  We always had a huge gas and a huge diesel tank in our yard for extra fuel.

After a few years we swapped to heating the house with wood, wood was always something that there was plenty of around the yard.  We had our own log splitter run by a tractor and would have to work to split wood most of the summer to have it for winter.  The wood burning furnace was hooked into the duct work with a blower (blower didn’t work with the power out).  We also had a fireplace and a wood burning stove though.  For long power outages we could move down and sleep in the living room to be near the heat.