Not Exactly Glamping at the Farm

After a lovely fancy post Thanksgiving breakfast with my parents and our very proper cousins Harry and Margaret, who dressed up for breakfast, Russ, Shay and I set down the road to see my other family. My father’s brother Wilson, who sadly is no longer with us in body, lived next door to my parents on the farm in the original family home. His children, my first cousins and all six of their children come home to be with their mother for Thanksgiving. The three first cousins, their spouses and their kids are a very tight knit group, so there is always some kind of fun going on around their house.

As Russ and I were leaving my parents I saw down the road that my Uncle Wilson’s 1970’s era pop-up Cox Camper was out of the stable and opened in the field. What I could not see from my original vantage point was that the whole family was sitting on the the other side of it in vintage camp chairs. If I didn’t know them to be doctors and therapists I would have thought some red neck family of gypsies had just set up camp on the farm.

My Uncle Wilson was a great camper. He also incredibly fastidious when it came to camping. We stopped to visit. We got quite a laugh about the many camping items my cousins had discovered still in their original boxes in the camper. It was as if my Uncle Wilson was right there with us. The many blue tarps, still in their factory folds were there, just in case there was a sudden storm. A never used camp griddle, still in it’s box was at the ready in case we wanted to cook up a batch of flap jacks.

My cousins were busy inspecting the whole contraption making plans for future camping trips so their children could experience camping like they did. The kids were intrigued for a while, but not enough to join in in the cleaning of the candy apple congoleum floor.

I told my cousins how much Airbnb places were charging for glamping experiences. We decided we could really make my father crazy by setting up a half dozen pop-up campers just in sight of his house and renting them out.

It may not have been the traditional Black Friday activity, but it was the perfect farm entertainment for a bunch of kids. My cousin Leigh is bound and determined to take this thing camping. We looked at the official registration sticker on the dirt covered license plate and since the last year this thing was registered was 1994 we decided it might need to be checked out to see how road worthy it is now. I’m sure that Cox Campers are not yet in the airstream category of vintage campers, but you never know when hipsters are going to decide they are the thing. When that happens my cousins will be set.

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