Camping with family, friends....and Leland

So a couple of friends and I were sitting next to a campfire at our campsite on the Labour Day weekend when this guy approaches us.

I didn’t know him but he knew me.

He looks at me and says, “Tina Comeau…What do I have to do to get you to mention me in the Vanguard?”

I get that a lot – people wanting to be in the newspaper. “Well,” I said. “Have you done anything interesting?” “I’m the only Leland in Wedgeport,” he said.

I told him I’d think about how I could work him into my column.

Meanwhile, my children and I made our second trip of the summer to Camper’s Haven in Arcadia. (I still call it Loomers – force of habit.)

Our family still doesn’t own a camper, so we rented, again – this time from Bayside RV Centre on the Hardscratch Road. It was a fifth wheel and significantly bigger than our last rental. My friends are already waiting to see what we show up with next year.

Then again, so am I.

Turns out I really enjoy camping, even though I’m only about a six-minute drive from my house.

Again, I left the frog hunting to the kids.

The mosquitos, on the other hand, hunted me down. I still fail to see their reason for existence. If I wanted to have my blood sucked while being annoyed at the same time I’d visit a vampire convention with nothing but “It’s a Small World” downloaded on my iPod.

But I digress.

Our second camping trip was even better than the first we had gone on a month earlier. We had better weather and I was better prepared. I’m far from a camping pro, but I wasn’t quite the camping novice I was on my first trip out. This time I came armed with sparklers, glow sticks and a macaroni casserole. Oh, and more chicken on a stick.

There was no shortage of hockey families in the campground. And no shortage of fun, particularly when it came to the family Olympics planned by the campground’s owners. It set the scene for lots of smiles and lots of laughs and was the inspiration for lots of photos. (I’ll also probably steal an idea or two for a birthday party I’ll be throwing next June.)

Near the end of the weekend I held a debut of a DVD of pictures, set to music, that my hockey/camper families and friends will be getting of the two weekends we spent at the park. Imagine if we had gone camping all summer, I told a friend. It would be a six-DVD season set.

I didn’t get a picture of Leland though – the guy hoping to get into the Vanguard. But I did promise him I’d mention him somehow, somewhere in the Vanguard before the end of September.

So to sum things up: My family and I went camping over the Labour Day weekend.

And so did Leland Cottreau.