Camping rules!! Add fishing to that and I'm living the dream. My dad took me on a "man's" vacation with some of his buddies. I was the only kid (13) and kinda skinny. One guy owned a deli and brought a big cooler full of meats and cheeses. I started making a sandwich and used 2 slices of meat. Meier said "boy you need to eat like a MAN so you grow". He musta slapped half a pound of meat on there. Best sandwich I ever ate!!

When I was a kid we didn't travel much, and I admit my memory honestly isn't great these days. BUT we did do yearly camping trips with some family friends :)  LOVED those.  Went  to one that had all kinds of slippery smooth rocks, you'd rock climb up the back and slide down the front

My Oma had a VW camper with the popup with bed.  We camped all over the US and Canada.  Some of the best times.

Every Sunday when I was early teens, my mom, aunt, uncle and cousins were waken up at 5 am to canoe.  Not your normal trip, but an 8 hour trip.  We would drop off a vehicle upstream - yes I said upstream - and drove to where we would start downstream.  My aunt liked to paddle!  So a normal 3 hour trip downstream took 8 hours.  I lived my early teen Sundays of hearing people on the river yelling (hey you guys are going the wrong way).  She and my uncle have since passed, but at family gatherings my mom pulls out the pictures from those trips and we always remember them fondly

My older sister went to band camp.  She's got me by 9 years.  I was 6 ot 7 y/o and drew a picture of me crying because she was gone, and I missed her.   The tears covered 3 pages.  I hung it over her bed so she saw when she came home.

Ani, you will appreciate this more than most...when I was a kid, we used to spend one week every summer in these little teeny cabins on the shores of Lake Michigan near Manistique.   They looked like Lincoln Log cabins and there was a slide out in the lake off the dock.  I learned to swim one summer when my dad took me out to the dock and threw me in - lol.

The week was almost as fun as the drive up and down (from Detroit!) sitting in the back of the station wagon in the rear facing seat (why on EARTH those were ever a thing is beyond me) trying to get every truck on I-75 to blow their horns :-) 

My grandparents lived on this really beautiful property that backed up to a national forest. As the oldest grandchild I would often go and stay with them for several weeks in the summer while my siblings and cousins would all rotate through for a few days at a time until they eventually were old enough to stay for longer stretched too. It was paradise. My grandmother cooked three full meals a day, and in between meals I was just outside all the time. Wandering around the forest, riding horses, sitting on the porch with my grandfather, playing in the creek that I was definitely not supposed to, riding my bike around the backroads. My dad's youngest brother was only 14 years older than me and made great money when he went into the oil field straight out of high school, but didn't marry until much later in life. So when he was around he would go nuts buying fireworks and toys for us kids and build bonfires every night. We'd pick watermelons out of the garden and drop them on the ground to crack them open and just eat them right out of the rind with a spoon sitting around the fire. 

Of course at the time, I didn't know that was anything special. Now when I think about it, I'd give just about anything to have one more day there and it's bittersweet that my kiddo is such a city kid and never got to experience anything like that. 

I have a morbid sense of what was fun from my childhood. My parents took all 9 of us kids and 3 cousins on a two week camping trip up to the Mountain Shasta area of Northern California. How my parents kept from killing all of kids, I don't know. My Great-Uncle had a cabin that sat on a gold mining claim and we had a blast, panning for gold, fishing, and swimming in the creek next to the cabin. One day we went to Whiskeytown Lake and spent the whole day fishing and swimming. On the way back to camp we noticed a lot of smoke, we didn't know that a forest fire had started about a mile from the cabin. When we reached the cabin my great-uncle told us to grab shovels and put the water pump into the creek, because the fire was coming our way, we didn't even think about evacuating.

Most of the property was clear of any under brush, we spent about an hour fighting small fires in the pine needles and leafs on the ground from flying hot embers. We could hear the sirens and fire planes flying over, but couldn't see anything because of all the smoke. Out of no where, a plane flew in really low and dropped borate retardant on the cabin and us, We looked like we had been in a bloody massacre, completely cover in wet red paste of the borate. Great Uncle was laughing like a crazy man and yelling at everyone to get in the creek and wash the borate off before it starting irritating our skin. I still have a color photo that was taken, before we got into the creek, all of us, red from head to toe, with the biggest grins on all our faces.

Two of my sisters are blonde and the borate, even though it was rinsed out quick, turn their hair pink, it slowly faded out over the summer.

I love that you brought up camping. I grew up camping, all kinds, and continue to do it often, all levels, now. Nature grounds me. In two weekends I'm heading out by myself to camp on some government land near some chutes and waterfalls. I can't wait.

When the border opens, you should come and camp on this side of Lake Superior!

Dad's job moved fairly frequently so my parents told us to think the change of venue like a holiday visit.  Plus they were always beyond broke and wouldn't camp.  LOLZ

So when we were off school we spent the summer in museums, art gallaries, etc (free aircon).  Even when we had a ski trip planned, Dad baulked at the last minute (after we had arrived at the ski resort) and we drove on to Florence instead.

I'm still a city break type person as a result.  Last trip was to a town on the Med.