Camping? Ew.

Why would I voluntarily live like a dog?

Okay, so I don’t like hiking or camping. I have a debilitating fear of snakes, I had a very terrifying experience as a child on my great grandparents farm and I have anxiety attacks if there’s one in my immediate vicinity. Have you ever been surprised by a rattlesnake snap at you while you're behind a sliding glass door? The snake snaps as you fall backwards onto your grandmas hideous linoleum floor, while the snake waivers its head at you, watching you while the venom from its strike to the glass drips down like yellow syrup.

Then you watch as your grandfather swings an axe from out of nowhere and hacks the snake into several pieces, violently decimating the creature and then he buries the pieces in the garden, as if it was a mob hit.

You'd never want to go outside again either.

I have friends that like hiking and camping.

Let me just say that I do exercise. I go to the gym, I do yoga, and I have Jane Fonda workout videos. I like going to the gym. I like going to the beach and jogging on the shoreline.

I just hate hiking. And camping.

I’ve been hiking in my life, on school field trips and with groups of friends.

All of those experiences were terrible. We got lost, we had no water, someone fainted and we didn’t know what to do, we saw a hole with snakes and ran away. All of the times that I have been hiking have been awful.

I’ve been camping a handful of times. What is so great about sleeping in a crappy tent made out of nylon and sleeping on the ground where no matter how much cushion you have between you and the ground, you wake up with Mount Kilimanjaro stabbing you in the back? Then you pack your entire campsite up in your backpack and hike to the next camping spot to set it all back up? No shower. No bath. No locks. You sleep with a thin material tent between you and everything in the world. You get to lay there and accept that a bear might come along and think you're Leonardo DiCaprio in the Revenant, that’s fun for you? There could be a murderer wandering the woods and you are the dumbass sleeping without a care in the world. That’s how horror movies start.

I had a conversation with a friend recently and she’s been trying to get me to go hiking and camping with her for years.

“It’s so wonderful to connect with nature.”

“I can connect with nature, just not for long periods of time.”

“But there’s something so magical about waking up in the morning and relying totally on yourself.”

“I do that now.”

“But to set up your shelter and be alone with your thoughts and no one else.”

“I have problems setting up email accounts, I’m not gonna put up a tent in less than an hour. And I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts, plus there’s other people hiking around you, you’re not truly alone.”

“You just need to give it a chance.”

“To live like a dog? No, no I’m fine not experiencing that again in my lifetime. I’m not gonna dig a hole every time I need to take a shit and I’m not prepared to defend myself should some psycho come after me while I’m hiking with an additional twenty pounds of shit on my back.”

If you like camping, good for you. I’m glad that you enjoy it and I hope you have many delightful experiences in the future.

For me though, that’s not my jam.

I sprain my ankle and I’m dead on the trail.

I went camping as a kid a lot with some extended family. The kids slept in tents and the adults slept in the motorhome. We’d spend the day riding jet skis and then barbecue at night. And I hated sleeping on a thin mattress with three other people. I hated it and I never wanted to do it again.

Guess what? I haven’t.