CSS Contest - Camping Adventures: 80s camping memories

Hello everybody, with this post I will share my camping memories and I wish to enter the contest by @aaliarubab

I went to camping every summer for the first 20 years of my life. Well, in 1977 I was 2 years old and my brother 6 months when our parents decided to come back to camping as they always did. So camping was just a sinonimous for summer holidays not an option.

I can't believe these pictures are 35 - 40 years old! I don't have a digital version of these so I photographed them with my cell phone.

This is the first camping tent, the blue one. It was just a little cube with heavy iron poles.

Every summer, with the car full of groceries, some clothes and the tent, we left from the south of Sardinia to reach the north-northeast coasts. The landscape is not much different from where we used to live, but it was always a kind of adventure. The car journey lasted about 4 hours including stops.

At the time in Sardinia there were some organized campings but you could also plant a tent everywhere. (Todays is forbidden do it out of authorized areas). So we just go without booking anything and we just stop when we found a place we liked.

I remember wonderful days playing on the beach, building send castles. We also spent hours in the water playing, sometimes snorkelling or fishing. We also loved being in the water with the lilos. They were the same mattresses we used to sleep on so they had to be taken out of the water and left to dry in the sun in the afternoon to prevent them from remaining damp. Here is me and my brother.

Camping was meet other people and I met for the first time strangers speaking other languages specially french and germans. I remember playing all day long with those kids speaking each other without understandng a word! Sand castles were great anyway! This is me on the left with a friend on the right. I don't remember who this little girl was :)

This is was our second and last tent. I think I was 14 here with my brother and my dad. We loved this tent that was like a little house, but also was bigger and havier then the first, with more iron poles to carry on!

If I would say the best spot for a tent, if the holiday is long it is necessary to stay under the trees, in fact in the summer the sun can be scorching. Furthermore, the trees shelter a little from the wind and in Sardinia the wind can sometimes be very intense. It's also a good idea to make a groove along the tent to let the water run off if it happens to rain.

The sea can be tricky and in Sardinia wind change quickly. Too crowded beaches are not that good so better avoid the month of august.

Waters are clear and beauty. There are not sharks in the Mediterranean sea but sometimes you can meet other nice friends like jellyfish :) Also in the rocks there are many sea urchins and their spines are very painful. I have been stung many times and when the sting enters the skin it is impossible to get it out because it breaks into tiny pieces. So you need an ointment that gets them out of the skin.

If I have to say one scary moment it's when my little brother got lost at the beach. I think he was 5 years old. Everyone was helping us look for him and we found him a few hours later sitting next to a car parked along the road. This car was a blue Fiat 128, identical to the one my grandfather had at the time. Fortunately he had stopped there thinking it was grampa car!

For me camping means sea and sand and the smell of pine. These perfumes remind me of beautiful moments and always give me a sense of freedom.

Thanks for reading the post. It was nice to go and find these photos that I hadn't seen for a long time.

I invite to the contest @petface @goodybest @davidesimoncini

Have a nice day to all!