You don’t need sunshine for great family memories - just family, writes Craig Cooper. Photo / NZME
It was the shortest long-drop I had ever seen.
Put it this way - if my sunglasses had fallen in, barbecue tongs would have been perfect for the retrieval operation.
I kept my legs closed and my mouth shut.
I was trespassing on the campsite as it was, as an uninvited guest, and didn’t want to cause trouble.
It was a family campsite, and a mate had convinced me to bypass the hottest New Year’s Eve beach party in the world and call in to say ‘hello’ to his girlfriend.
It was 28C outside, but the girlfriend’s father was frosty when we turned up in a Ford Escort loaded with a crate of warm beer and some 1980s music.
On account of the fact it was the 1980s.
(Having since become the father of a teenage girl, I understand why unannounced teenage boys are not welcomed with a pōwhiri and feast.)
It was a quiet New Year’s Eve, at least by my standards. Not so the mate, based on the noise coming from his girlfriend’s tent as they said ‘hello’ to each other.
Fast-forward a decade or two, and my pregnant wife and I were tenting on a waterfront beach site, complete with power.
Late summer, we had wanted to avoid the Christmas rush.
We were armed with two books of baby names, and Radiohead’s freshly released OK Computer album.
Radiohead’s Kid A album would have been more appropriate, but like our daughter, it hadn’t been born yet.
We had neighbours in a campervan. I met them briefly one morning when they asked if I knew anything about their power being turned off in the middle of the night. They had awoken to the contents of a tepid fridge. I knew nothing about it, although it was an odd coincidence that I had got up in the middle of the night to turn our site’s power off at the communal power box.
We went home, mutually agreeing that OK Computer was amazing and lacking a consensus on our baby’s name.
Until I picked up an Ella Fitzgerald CD a while later, looked at my wife and said, “Ella”, and she said, “That’s it”.
Fast-forward again - this time camping in an open field, now with two kids under five.
Late summer, we had wanted to avoid the Christmas rush.
While the holiday lacked the aggravation of crowds of people, there was rain and wind, like we’ve had this past week.
We tied a few knots in loose ropes, secured the gazebo and abandoned the tent for the day, driving over a hill and far away to a seaside village where we had coffee and wandered around an art gallery, hoping the kids wouldn’t break anything.
We hadn’t taken much; some dry clothes and a digital mixtape of early-2000s music.
On account of the fact it was the early 2000s.
We got back home to the campsite and our battered tent. The gazebo had blown several metres away.
To this day, it mystifies me as to why someone would untie it in a storm.
It didn’t matter though. As Edward Sharpe and his magnificently named Magnetic Zeros sang that day, “Home is wherever I’m with you”.
Our little road trip was full of humour and song. You don’t need sunshine for great family memories - just family.
OPINION: Serpentine route battered by storm and floods.