A Clayton's Camp

There was an ad on TV a few years ago for Clayton's - the drink you have when you're not having a drink. This week I took the  boys on a Clayton's camp - the camp you have when you're not having a camp.

Timothy has been down from Mackay for about a fortnight and I thought he should have an overnight in the van while he was here. I couldn't leave Cory and Hudson so I took all three of them for an exciting evening at Pelican Park at Clontarf, a good fifteen minutes from home. We had intended to set off mid afternoon but I discovered that Krista had cooked chicken and roast veges. A crispy-skinned roast potato is one of the foods which can change my plans in an instant. We had dinner before we left and arrived on the Redcliffe Peninsula in the cool of the early evening.

I learned a lot from taking Cory, Hudson and Cooper to Goombungee. Even though Tim is older (11) and I wasn't expecting too much nonsense, I knew that attempting to settle the boys too early was not a good idea. Pelican Park is not really a camping area. There is a very busy boat ramp and large parking bays which now seem to be overnight spots for up to a dozen travellers. With the Information Centre, boat ramp, picnic area and children's playground, there have to be good facilities so we did what good campers do and used the toilets, showers, and barbecue as though we weren't a mere 15km from home.

We had a bit of a wander around, checking on the tide (going out), the boats (a couple of tinnies tied up), and making sure that our van was a reasonable distance from others.. But I couldn't put bedtime off forever. After the Goombungee weekend, I had decided that three people could be comfortable and four was a squeeze. So, with four of us, I was prepared for yet another squeeze. What I wasn't prepared for was a night of musical beds. Tim stayed on the floor but moved his head from one end of the mattress to the other a few times. Hudson started in the double bed but complained that he was hot. Cory was happy to swap with him as he had decided that his bed was too narrow. Cory and I experimented with making the double bed work. We tried both heads at the same end and then top to tail. We slept across the width of the van and then tried sideways on the bed, which suited him but left me with either head or feet overflowing onto the bench.

However, eventually we all slept - and got up early, for cereal in the barbecue area and a half hour in the playground. By then we had reached 6.30am, far to early to go home. You can't call it even a Clayton's camp if it is less that twelve hours. For more than forty years, our kids have gone to the Cotton Tree Forest at Scarborough, also known as the climbing trees. That's where we went next, knowing that they could fill in quite a bit of time. Of course, this was followed by a visit to the Shields Street cafe and my first coffee of the day, before arriving home at about 11.30.

Each time I go out in the van, I find something else that I would like to change. I will definitely have to do something about the single bed as the boys are all growing tall and need a full length bed. I have bought a folding solar panel and will find out a bit more about it soon. I am not in a hurry to do anything as I plan to spend a few weeks travelling by myself before I make any modifications. But in the meantime I am slowly preparing for the next big adventure.