Revised Diagnostic Essay

City Girls Camping

My family and I have always lived in the city. When I was eleven years old my divorced mother decided to bring my two sisters, my aunt, and I camping. Expecting this to be an adventurous vacation, none of us realized how unprepared we were for this trip.

When we got to the campsite, which was about thirty minutes away from Jamestown, the tent was the first disaster. Sliding the long metal rods through the holes in the tent is usually easy and self explanatory. However I managed to puncture three different holes in the tent trying to put the rods in. Then we could not press the stakes in the ground hard enough to hold the tent up.

My sister asked me, “How did u rip three holes in the tent but you cannot put the stakes in the ground?”

Frustrated and drenched with perspiration I whined, “It was a cheap tent.”

It took an hour and forty-five minutes for all five of us to put the tent together and secure it. However, we also had to patch the holes which didn’t hold well through the night. After all that hard labor we became hungry.

Canned vegetables, canned soup, some hamburger meat, chicken, and bread was what my mother brought for us to eat. My aunt hid s’more supplies, candy, and chips in the car. Starting the fire pit was needed for my mom’s food. We noticed that we were supposed to bring our own rocks to put around the pit; however, my mom did not think to bring any. So she suggested that we go to each abandoned fire pit and take one rock. After gathering enough rocks and placing the wood in the middle, we thought all you had to do was throw the match into the center and sticks would begin to crackle. Unfortunately that did not work.

We gave up on starting the fire and headed to see Jamestown. It was the hottest day of the year so walking around outside looking at old Indian material was not the highlight of our trip, but we made the best of it. My aunt was really into all the different equipment they showed the guests. She would carry around the buckets of food on her head until she tripped over he own foot and spilt the dry grains everywhere. We laughed for hours after watching that. Then she tried to smash these berries, but the way she was doing it was not working. A tiny girl, who looked about six years old, grabbed the bowl from my Aunt and made the berries into jam in about ten seconds.

The little girl looked at her and explained rudely, “You got to put some muscle in it girl.”
I laughed so hard I started to cry. As we were leaving to go back to the campsite my mother saw a stack of apartment books, and wanted to use the paper to start the fire.
When we arrived back at the campsite there were two guilty squirrels digging through our trash that we had left out before we rushed to Jamestown. Shredded paper and half eaten food were strewn across our campsite. Luckily my aunt hid her junk food stash in the car. While my sisters and I started cleaning the mess, my mom worked on starting the fire again. This time she got the flames to produce.

As we ate, watching the sun go down, we reminisced through all of the extreme events that happened earlier that day. As we talked about it we could not stop laughing and joking about how horrible we were at camping. Even though there were frustrating times, I still giggle thinking about our wild camping trip.