Family Camping Last July

We went camping at KOA in San Diego this summer, as we have for many summers in a row - over the 4th of July. For us, camping means renting a small wood "kabin" at the KOA which has 2 rooms and electricity, and that's about it. The campground has central bathrooms and showers, and a central outdoor kitchen/cooking area, which is nice.

This year I forgot to bring the power cables. Soon after arriving, I went to buy some new ones at Walmart. I bought two power strips (one with a really long cable on it), and one of those wall-plate-cover-blocks that has 6 outlets in it and a light telling you the surge protection is active, which I installed over the back room's power outlet on the wall. I ended up with cables all over. The front room's power outlet has the long cord going up and over the front door frame, to power the stuff on the other side of the room: a 3-foot-tall refrigerator we brought with us, and our favorite coffee maker. The shorter power strip is also plugged into the front room's outlet to power smaller devices we brought with us.

The front power-strip has these things plugged into it:

• Nintendo DS recharging cable
• Kayla's Kindle recharging cable
• Clinton's cell phone recharger
• Kayla's cell phone recharger
• normally we'd have a front porch light plugged in here, too, but we forgot to bring it this year.

The rear power-block has these things plugged into it:

• string of lights that serve as night-lights, strung along the floor between our 2 rooms
• Paul's laptop recharging
• Sherri's laptop recharging
• power cord recharging the inflatable mattress inflator's battery, since it's an off-line style hookup where you can't inflate your mattress when the battery is dead, EVEN WHEN IT'S PLUGGED IN (you have to let it fully charge)
  
• battery recharger for the digital camera, because we took a lot of pictures
• my cell-phone recharger cable because it's a smart phone which needs recharging every night.
  

Now, one of the power strips has its plugs rotated 90 degrees, to help for people who have wall-warts that take up a lot of room. And, symmetrically, half of our wall-warts are the new kind that are rotated 90 degrees to help people who have the old non-rotated power stripts. Put them together, and yes, that's right, THE PROBLEM STILL EXISTS! Rotating everything 90 degrees cancels out the whole idea! With a little creative thinking we were able to get most of our electronics plugged in when we needed it.

But what are we going to do when Sherri's phone needs recharging? We'll probably have to unplug my laptop during the day and charge her phone then; I can recharge my laptop during the night; or vice-versa.

This is a good example of the many struggles we overcame while roughing it, camping, this year.

I really don't know how the early settlers managed it.