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I am not a camper.

That’s probably the first thing you should know.  I am not a camper.  I have camped. Once.  Maybe twice? At least once. For sure once.

It’s 6:09 in the morning, and I’m wheeling my brand new, as-large-as-the-restrictions-would-allow REI bag to the elevator of my hotel. I’m about to meet the as of yet unknown number of people I’ll be traveling with for the next seven months.  Seven months or approximately 217 days as we travel overland from London, England, where I’ve spent the last month, to Sydney, Australia. Two hundred seventeen days, 31 countries (if Iran approves us), 11 time zones, and one non-camper who has signed up to do roughly 72 days of camping during this journey. Some of it bush camping.

For those who (like me until recently) aren’t familiar with bush camping, it basically means when the driver gets tired, we pull over on the side of the road and pitch our tents.  No campground. No showers. No toilets. 

I am not a camper.  But by the time I get to Sydney, I will have done a lot of camping.

Other than the camping, what I’m most nervous, cautious, unsure about is traveling in this way with other people. Until now, I’ve vacationed with close friends, and my long trips have been solo trips. I like to do my own thing. Or do my thing with my besties.

Grandma Mary is most concerned I’ll have nice people on my trip. I suspect all the others will be nice, or at least interesting, but that doesn’t mean I’ll enjoy riding in a contained space with them every day. Every day for 217 days. I figure if I can just get through the ‘Stans (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan), I can bail and do Southeast Asia on my own.  It’s probably lame to admit I have an exit strategy before I’ve even climbed aboard, but there it is.

I also have no idea how to pack for a seven-month trip that involves cold, snowy mountain passes, dry sandy deserts, and wet, humid jungles. The suggested packing list on the website lost all credibility with me when I got to the ‘4 pairs of underwear’ bullet. No way in hell am I only bringing four pairs of underwear.  I’d be washing them all the time! I packed 14 pairs. Like any sensible human. List be damned. One of them has little motorbikes on it. They’re adorable. I’ve contained all my pairs of underwear and various other objects into the number of bags and dimensions requested, but I have no idea if I packed appropriately.  Another unknown. 

I turn the corner, and there it is. The giant orange and gray hybrid that will be home base for this journey. Neither truck nor bus but a little bit of both. In fact, I’m about to learn it has permits as both a truck and a bus, depending on which gets us through customs and border crossings faster. There are a handful of others milling about as well, and at first, it’s unclear who is in charge, who I should be checking in with. But pretty quickly, the paperwork is finished, the remaining payment handed over, and fourteen of us climb aboard to get the 411 on how this whole thing is going to work.

Our tour leader, Gayle, takes over with some updates. She’s the one who introduces us to Alice, the name of our orange and gray beast. She explains it’s a reference to the children’s song about Alice, the camel. I’d forgotten all about that song. But it stuck in my head for days after the reminder. She’s put us into Cook Groups of three, and we’ll rotate making dinner and then the next breakfast on the days we’re camping.

I cross my fingers in my mind, hoping I won’t be in the first cook group. I’m not that confident in my ability to cook for a group of 16 people in general, but cooking for a group on our propane burners is absolutely not in my comfort zone. Plus, I have to put up my tent and let’s be honest. That could take hours. I’ve only done it twice before and had a more experienced coach sipping beer nearby when I did, just in case I needed help.

I needed help.

“So tonight’s cook group will be Cat, Jenny, and Stacey.”

Of course. At least I had already met my fellow chefs, and they both seemed lovely. Jenny was living in Ireland but from England, and Cat was Scottish. She had a notebook that read, When nothing goes right, Go left. I felt sure we’d be friends. 

Alice will be our home base and our transportation until we get to Southeast Asia. In addition to our cook group rotation, we will also periodically be doing ‘Truck Cleans’ where absolutely everything gets taken off, the lockers get emptied out, and we scrub every inch of her. She doesn’t have air or heat. If you sit in the front, the view is better, but it’s hot. If you sit in the back, which eventually becomes my favorite spot, the breeze is nice, but it’s bumpy. Super bumpy.

Before long, we’re on the ferry pulling away from the chalky, white Cliffs of Dover and crossing the English Channel into France. I nearly get lost on the ferry, waiting in the wrong stairwell, confused by why I don’t see any of the other Overlanders, and then I realize I’m supposed to be in the green section. It’s cool, though, because nobody saw. We move quickly through France and into Belgium, where we will be camping the first night.

After arriving at the campground, everyone scatters to set up their tents except the three newly appointed chefs. We start setting up our ‘kitchen’ and tackling dinner for the night. I’m an excellent chopper, so I grab a cutting board and knife and begin slicing vegetables while the others start cooking chicken and shredding carrots. We’re making fajitas. 

Dinner is when we will go through any group announcements for the trip. Mostly this is logistics, breakfast times, leave times, upcoming visas, or border crossing information. We devour our food while Gayle gives us the updates. 

When we’ve finished cleaning up and packed the mobile kitchen back into the bowels of Alice, I take a deep breath and grab my tent. Time to attempt erecting this thing. Here we go.

I pull everything out of the bag and start to assemble the frame. Cat is working on her tent next to me.

“I’ve got to be honest. I don’t really know what I’m doing,” I tell her.

She laughs and admits she doesn’t really know either. That’s reassuring. At least we’re in it together. Luckily, the ‘practice’ sessions I did at home come back to me, and before too long, my tent is standing proudly, a pop of orange and green along the grassy lawn of the campsite. I join some of the others for a celebratory glass of wine.

Eventually, I find my way back to my tent for the night. My mattress doesn’t seem fully inflated, and the ground is hard. A harsh introduction for my first night. I shuffle around, noisy in my sleeping bag on top of my mat inside my tent. I’m very deliberate when moving from my back to my side to my back again to keep all my sleeping gear from tangling and constricting me. I grimace and sigh, and close my eyes.

Twenty minutes later, the house on the hill across the street from our campsite starts blaring the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. This doesn’t wake me because I have still been unable to find a cozy enough position to sleep.  The Bee Gee’s transition to Dirty Dancing followed by the Sultans of Swing.

I am uncomfortable. Is that a rock? My mattress is defiantly not inflated all the way. Or at all….

Billie Jean. I do love a little MJ.

Okay, I really need to sleep. I have to be up to make breakfast for everyone in the morning, and we’re pulling out at 7:15 am. So breakfast has to be ready at 6:30, which means we have to start breakfast at 5:45. So I have to be showered and packed up before then, so I should be up by 5 am at the latest. At. The. Latest.

The beats of 99 Luftballons waft into my tent. I’m actually really starting to enjoy this. 

But I do need to sleep. Eventually, I do.

So I guess, now, I am a camper.