A group of us went to Santa Cruz, California and camped at a state park near the beach. This isn’t the type of camping where you carry a knapsack weighing more than you do while hiking to the middle of nowhere in search of a spot no human has seen since the Pleistocene days, usually for good reason. No, in our case it meant hauling our things 50 feet from the car to a numbered, reserved campsite. On the downside, it also meant we had people all around us, making it more of a camping commune than a chance to commune with nature.

     You’ve probably detected that I’m not a camping person. It’s not that I’m a priss or anything, I just figure that if we were meant to live in tents god wouldn’t have given us roofing shingles. Or toilets that flush. But if I’m nothing, I’m a good sport. And I’m willing to try and experience most anything that doesn’t leave permanent scars, especially emotional ones.

    We didn’t exactly rough it. We got there late the first night and set up our tents in the dark—okay, so one of us needed help, I said it wasn’t my tent—then decided to go into town and get a pizza. The next day after our hike we stopped at a Safeway and bought ice, Oreos, and a pot so we could boil water without borrowing one because, well, even experienced campers can’t be expected to remember everything. But we did rough it in our own way. I’m proud to say I didn’t bring my laptop and no one brought a cell phone. Of course if we had we wouldn’t have had to break camp to go into town for that pizza—we could have had it delivered in 30 minutes or less.

     But we were far from winning the Lap of Luxury Camping Award. One group of campers showed up with five coolers, eight plastic lawn chairs, a four-room tent complete with a full kitchen and a rec room (with a pretty nice pool table, I might add), and a portable generator for their Play Station. Then they had the nerve to get upset because they couldn’t leave their car at the campsite. I mean, what’s the use of having a satellite dish mounted on the roof of your SUV if you can’t use it? Maybe next time they’ll remember to bring a longer coaxial cable.

     We had a good hike through a redwood forest. True, we had to drive to get there, but as I mentioned, this was far from a purist camping weekend. The hike was about five miles, the scenery was beautiful, and we got a decent bit of exercise. This is the way a hike should be, unlike taking one with my brother and his wife, who think no hike is a good hike unless you wear the treads off your brand new hiking boots, collapse at the end while convincing yourself that exhaustion equals invigoration, and you’ve covered more miles than the Mir space station. Preferably in half the time.

     I once went on a hike with them, and once is the imperative word. This re-creation of the Bataan Death March was supposed to be eight miles and moderately strenuous because all I had to wear was sneakers. Take it from me, you should always have the proper gear when you do something like this—hiking in sneakers is like playing football wearing a ski cap. Which is why we picked a short and easy one. And it was until we took the wrong trail and ended up on a 7-hour, 14-mile hike crawling up gully washes, clambering over old rockslides that were just itching to act up again, and walking cliffside paths so narrow the mountain goats were taking out insurance policies on our lives. Let’s just say that even now I break out in a cold sweat if they ask me to walk to the grocery store with them.