They say that the past is mythified and possible, but when I think of the summers I spent in campsites in Castilla as a child I always feel a kind of nostalgia. Due to my father’s work, our summers were quite long. Most of the friends I had were up to a month, but we, at times, would spend two months on vacation. Now I think about it and it seems like too much time (who is two months in a row on vacation now?) But at that time time flew by.
My father was a bit the organizer of the whole thing. It’s not that my mother, at least at first, was very happy to go camping, but in the end she got used to it. And is that spending long periods in a tent or in a caravan is not the most glamorous in the world … but tan.
My father was very seasoned in country life. For many years I came to think that my father was able to fix anything that got between his eyebrows. He rode everything when we arrived at the campsite, almost without help. One of his favorite areas was the barbecue covered by polyethylene tarps for rainy days, which every summer, without exception, ended up arriving.
In the first campsites that we stayed the rules were not very clear and as long as you did not bother the neighbor and you did not start a fire, you could do anything. My father took advantage of everything to make our stay as comfortable as possible, considering that we were in the middle of a forest. I always wanted to be by the river because it said it was the best area of that campsite. Maybe it was to have a nearby water source, but the truth is that we are fried by mosquitoes. Anyway that was our place, everyone knew that the plot next to the river was for us.
I still remember when it started pouring rain and we all stayed underneath polyethylene canvas looking at the river and laughing or playing the broom. They were not very comfortable summers, but we had a great time.