camping – Little Piece of Quiet

Our family enjoys to go on yearly camping trips. The prep and return is always exhausting but the reward is a few days of technological silence. To explain, we camp way up in the Smokies where there is no cell signal. You may think a Technical Support Engineer like myself would have a love for technology, but on the contrary the longer I am in this field, the more I find myself liking it less and less and being drawn to a much more digitally quiet life.

When camping, for three days we hear no phones, no texts, no calls, no social media notifications, nothing but the sound of the water on the rocks in the river behind our tents, and sometimes a very loud owl waking us up in the middle of the night. The girls get to explore nature, catch butterflies, play in streams, and burn off pent up energy while we get relax by a fire, and spend time together, while chasing off the occasional bear.

I know this isn’t a long post, and I don’t even know what the purpose of it is, except maybe to encourage someone else to take some time to unplug as well. Or maybe I am just missing those quiet mornings being woken up by the sound of birds, instead of alarms.

Had the awesome opportunity of going camping with my husband’s family this year. It’s an annual tradition on their part but this was my first time attending. It certainly was an experience, I don’t think I’ve been camping since I was about 5 or 6 years old.

But I enjoyed it. Huge family gathering in the mountains, no cell service, no internet, if you needed to make a phone call you had to drive down to the ranger station to use their phone. It was a completely tech free vacation… except for my camera.

To be honest, I was a little worried about sleeping in a tent. Mainly I was worried about falling off the inflatable mattress! But I was glad we weren’t sleeping on the ground, it was freezing at night. One thing I was not expecting, were the pretty frequent visits from Black Bears. They generally skirted the edges of the camp ground but always managed to slip away before I had a chance to capture them on camera, only picture I got below is pretty blurry but managed to see this bear cub as well.

Of course seeing a couple of bears right outside your tent door so to speak (it was really probably 200 feet away) made it even harder to sleep at night.

But anyways. Other than the wildlife and cold, the trip was over all very fun, I can’t wait to go again next year. We had fun in the streams, checked out the nearby historic sites, and just overall had fun. I also caught up on some reading. I will admit, this was a much needed, reprieve from the harsh realities of life. Didn’t have to talk to anyone on the phone or have customers yelling at me for trivial things. I wish I could do this once a month.