The community we live in regularly, the Coloma-Lotus Valley, has been a wonderful fit for us - full of like-minded people with similar values and mores to our own. Who better to have join us, then in the trailer community? Camping is much more than a pastime for us: we are camping enablers – dealers, in fact: we essentially sell camping as a part of our rafting trips – the fewer amenities, the higher the price – we call it an “upgrade”.
It’s just a little bit funny that we live 400 yards down the road from a campground people travel to. We’ve chosen to camp there for birthday parties, holiday gatherings, etc. Not to mention living there for the first four years in the community, and in a tent for four of the first six months of Jordan’s life. For many in our Coloma-Lotus community who spent much of their early adult lives as river guides or kayakers or rock climbers, camping is almost a more natural way of life than one of mortgage-paying, lawn-mowing regularity.
Tom offered up our trip to Santa Cruz on Facebook. We had plenty of takers. A friend planning on Thanksgiving with her mother-in-law in Santa Cruz signed up first, camping offering a great respite from the stress of staying with two boys under seven in the near-pristine abode of a single older woman. (Same irony – her home was just a little further from the campground in Santa Cruz than ours is from our local campground.) Two more families were game so it was four sets of parents, six boys between four and 7, a 6 year-old girl and a two-month-old.
What we all do together on a camping trip isn’t all that removed from what we do together at home in Lotus from the kids’ perspective: ride bikes, dig in the sand, fight, get over it, fight some more, play endlessly. For the parents, though, it’s a world of difference: there’s no work, no carpets to vacuum, no bills to pay. There’s surfing, mountain biking, and best of all, community meals and cleanup. It’s not necessarily an easier way of life as having children automatically means you’re working: feeding, cleaning, making fires, keeping the kids safe and providing opportunities for play, but it makes its own argument for cooperative living. It’s pretty sweet to share a cup of coffee over a morning campfire while having a discussion about which surf break to hit that day and whether there’s enough brie, wine and marshmallows for dinner that night.
On the flip side, there are raccoons. You’d think a bunch of raft guides would have the whole prep for disaster thing in mind, but given the cumulative losses to the masked intruders, you wouldn’t be impressed. As raft guides, some of us way too organized and some of us with a wing it attitude, we split the difference on dinner prep. For paying passengers we would have paid a lot more attention to presentation – for a family camping trip we focused on getting food into the kids’ bellies, keeping the beer cold and keeping it simple. Luckily with this group simple meant salmon, rice pilaf and broccoli with a starter course of pot stickers with a dessert of homemade marshmallow s’mores. We’ve got kids with expensive tastes, apparently – no hotdogs for this group. Everything was done at the same time and the amounts were perfect. Best of all was cleanup – quick, efficient, and in no time everyone was back around the campfire with a beer. 
It’s pretty fun taking a bunch of river kids to the beach. (It’s pretty fun taking a bunch of river kids anywhere.) Wave jumping, sand-burying, shell collecting while half the parents were off surfing was pretty great. The water was cold enough that the surfers only lasted a few hours so there was plenty of parent-child interaction for everyone.
I’m always grateful for my community, but seeing them on the beach and in the campground, being great parents, getting dirty, wave jumping with my kids, letting it all go, holding my baby, toasting marshmallows reinforced my appreciation for them all over again. I think it’s pretty normal to occasionally wonder what it would be like to live somewhere else, to buy in to the grass is always greener fantasy, but these people are a pretty nice anchor.
