In this episode:

Have you ever had a rustic camping adventure? In this episode, I talk about the time when worms rained from the trees at our campsite, and I give five life application tips that I've learned from camping.

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Inspired Life
Over the years, our family made a lot of memories while camping. Many summer weekends we would pack up and head to a state park for a few days.
I didn’t love it as much as my guys. Being the only girl in a family of guys, they prefer things a lot more rustic.
To me, there was something backwards about loading up all that gear, driving for six hours, and setting up our tent camper for another two hours just to get away from real life. Some aspects of real life appealed to me. Like showers. Running water. Air conditioning. I liked my curling iron and my dishwasher too.
My idea of roughing it still involves flush toilets and electricity. On one of our camping trips we went to a state park that spanned the St. Croix River between Wisconsin and Minnesota. It was a beautiful park with many hiking trails and a sandy beach at a little swimming hole for the kids.
We pulled in long before daylight faded and started to set up our antique pop-up camper. I know it’s antique because I camped in it when I was an infant and it had been around for a while already then. Besides, a similar camper to ours resides in the Smithsonian.
This was a primitive camper with two plywood sides that flip out and a bunch of tent poles that had to be assembled and attached to the box frame of the camper. Then, a big green musty-smelling canvas tent covered the whole thing.
When it was all set up, it was a box with a double bed on both sides and a tent over the top. That’s it. Just a tent off the ground. No kitchen. No storage or cabinets. No bathroom. Because of the age of the canvas, we usually covered the whole thing with a big blue plastic tarp strung up in the trees.
After Phil backed the camper into just the right spot, we started setting up. I busied myself with setting up lawn chairs around the fire pit and creating a cooking space at the picnic table.
I was about to toss the plastic tablecloth over the rustic picnic table when a fuzzy worm inched its way toward the middle. Then I noticed another one. There was one on the bench too, and when I looked over to say something to Phil, there was one on the camper.
I soon realized the camper and the Jeep and the lawn chairs had caterpillars all over them. That’s when I noticed it was raining worms. Like big fuzzy green raindrops, tent caterpillars fell from the trees.
I got back in the Jeep and said, “I’m not coming out.”
“Can we please run to the Wal-Mart I saw a few miles back? I just need to buy a hat. I don’t want these stupid worms in my hair.”
One morning I laid in the bed watching the silhouettes of worms on the tent roof. Eeew!

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