Camping Trips and Spatulas

One year I took just William and Gwenna camping. We drove down to Trail River Campground at Kenai Lake and slept the night crammed in my two man tent. The next morning I got up to fix breakfast only to find I had forgotten all the cooking utensils. Luckily we didn’t need much. Except we were going to have scrambled eggs and I couldn’t find anything on my leatherman that resembled a spatula.

So I had the kids look for a suitable piece of wood. Soon they found a large piece of cottonwood bark. Cottonwood bark is great for carving because it is soft and easy to split. Now the leatherman came in handy! In no time, we had ourselves a spatula. The kids thought it was the coolest thing. We had a blast scrambling eggs with it.

This is one of the reasons why I love camping. Something unexpected always happens and it inevitably tests your knowledge and skills. On every campout something is forgotten or lost. Once I spent a week cooking on a flat rock because we lost the stove when the raft over turned. I love that. It must be the MacGyver in me. It’s those experiences that make camping so fun.

Will and Gwen loved that trip and making a spatula is one of the best memories from it. You can’t schedule or plan memories like. We still have that spatula and we still take it camping. Though, we now know if we forget it we can always make another one.