A summer of camping around

Its been, for us, a camping summer.

These lines are being composed from a campsite overlooking Lunenburg's back harbour in a campground run by the Town of Lunenburg.

Each year for 20 years now, we have made a summer pilgrimage to the Lunenburg Folk Harbour Festival, where we have listened to good music in a tent at the top of nearby Blockhouse Hill. It is the day before the festival is to open, and on the hill people have been erecting the huge mainstage tent where all of the evening performances are to be held.

All day familiar faces have been pulling into the campgrounds, people who have become friends, from places like Massachusetts and South Carolina. They too have been coming to this festival of folk music for years.

Over the next four days – and it will all be over by the time The Queens County Advance is published – we will be hearing music by such people as Murray Mclaughlan, David Myles, Gordie Sampson and Rose Cousins. Some of the songs will be in the mainstage tent, some on the wharf, some at the town's bandstand and some in the various halls around the town.

Through it all, we will be camped, right in the middle of it.

Two years ago we took our 16-year-old L.L. Bean tent and camped along the Eastern Shore. Unknown to us when we started out, a tropical storm was making its way up the seaboard, and once we got the tent up, the rain bucketed down. We had been dry in that tent as far away as Sweden, but this time it leaked. By the time we woke up everything we owned was soaking wet, and we headed for the nearest bed and breakfast.

Last summer we took a bed and breakfast trip down to Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. We stopped by the Maine town of Freeport, made famous by the L.L. Bean store, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. We spoke to the people in the camping section and asked them if they had anything to seal an L.L. Bean tent that had started to leak.

Look, they said, just bring the tent back. We will give you a new one.

We could hardly believe it. We had bought this tent in 1990, and it had given us many years of good service. How could they give us a new one?

So this year we headed down the Maine coast, looking for a good clam chowder and taking with us the leaky tent. We found some good chowders, one in a place called Cappy's, a busy chowder house in a town called Camden, which has a beautiful harbour.

We set up camp near Freeport, at a place called Recompence Shore Campground, and spent the next couple of days hanging out at the L.L. Bean store. We took our leaky tent to the service counter and explained that it leaked. "Have you picked out another tent?" we were asked.

The lady behind the counter told us to leave the tent with her and go and select another. We chose the latest high-tech tent, with a vestibule, and carried it back to the counter. The lady took down our information, traded the leaky tent for the brand new one, and sent us on our way, without a penny changing hands (of course we spent lots on other stuff).

No wonder the L.L. Bean store in Freeport has over three million customers a year. We compared it to a recent experience at the Canadian Tire store in Bridgewater, where we complained about a portable Terminator battery storage pack that had stopped working (as had a friend's). We were told that they could do nothing for us.

Getting back to music, one thing the L.L. Bean store does is sponsor free summer concerts. We were there the night the original band that backed Buddy Holly – the Crickets – was putting on a show. Thousands of people gathered in the concourse between two of the Bean stores on a balmy summer night to listen.

Every song the Crickets did was familiar, the whole audience swaying to the music. Just as we wondered what the kids in the crowd thought of the songs, a bunch of them got up and started dancing at the front of the stage. The members of the Crickets told stories of how they wrote some of the tunes in the back of a 1958 Chev, but despite their advanced age, they did a good job and even the teenagers cheered.

- Tom Sheppard can be reached at twsheppard@gmail.com