What do you get when you mix a bunch of kids, a wide-open campground, and a little bit of dirt?

F.U.N. Especially when it’s camping.

Does your family go camping, whether in a tent, RV, or public use cabin?<—-cabins count in Alaska, since most cabins are in pretty remote places and are very similar to camping.

Ours took a shakedown trip to Eagle River Campground last weekend so we could get to know our new RV from Great Alaskan Holidays. It’s a big rig with lots of buttons, doors, and instructions, and we needed to figure out some of that important stuff in “real camping time.” We also just wanted to get out of town for a while (Do your parents ever say that? Mine did, and usually it meant we’d go camping.).

Eagle River Campground is one of those places we drive by often but never stay, mostly because it’s only 15 minutes from Anchorage and near

Were you raised to spend summer nights in a canvas tent, cooking meals over a campfire and playing until all hours among the leafy trees and rocky streams? I was, and so were many of my friends. My parents would pack the VW Bus with sleeping bags, coolers, boots, extra clothes, and that smelly canvas tent and away we’d go, sometimes to a real campground but more often to some remote place at the end of a logging road in Washington or Oregon.

What do I remember? Oh my, the smell of bacon in my dad’s old cast iron frying pan, of toast stuck atop a forked stick and held over the fire. The sound of loons on a quiet mountain lake, and squirrels chattering in the tops of Douglas fir trees. And my parents. I remember how relaxed they were in the woods, my father standing near the fire, a can of