Camping for city slackers

I have mixed feelings about camping. I like it if the weather's perfect and there's a decent bathroom and running water and we don't have to carry anything too far. And the floor's not lumpy and there are no bugs. Otherwise, it all seems like a little too much trouble and too little sleep. Hm, I guess that's not really "mixed" feelings. My co-writer Felicity at Japan Pulse wrote a post about camping in Japan for amateurs. These campsites put up the tent for you and provide all the goods for a campfire meal. You just roll up with a change of clothes and maybe a toothbrush. The fanciest level of service was "princess camping," which comes with a butler. You know, a camping butler. (Surely this calls for Photoshop.)
I met up with some friends of a friend for a night of camping over Golden Week. It was an old cabin campground on the bank of Lake Saiko, one of the five beautiful lakes around Mt. Fuji.  It's a nice site, compact. Over the years they kept adding cabins in the spaces between cabins until it reached its current slightly crowded state. The public toilets there were cleaner and nicer than in any train station bathroom. The group of people I was with go camping once per season and always put up a banner that says "Sound of Mountain." They keep a group journal and split up the equipment, from folding tables and cast iron pans to a tightrope to sling between trees for fun. They didn't choose the campsite for its mod cons, but I appreciated having them. The gravel parking lot is just steps from the cabins - all the easier to lug the cardboard boxes of food, spices and even a kit they used to smoke cheese and salami over sakura wood chips. The cabins have tatami floors and the front office rents thin futon mats and wool blankets for an extra 100 yen apiece. There was also an overhead fluorescent light. It had an outlet where they plugged in a computer for music and an electric water pot, rigged securely with the tightrope to hang from a ceiling beam, because its cord was too short to reach the floor.
We made a huge pot of curry for dinner with vegetables from a roadside stand -- and a can of tuna fish someone had brought. At least cooler heads prevailed when someone wanted to throw in a ton of celery greens.
We sat around after dinner, shivering, leaning into the fire for warmth and squinting against the smoke from damp pine branches and dried needles. They asked for some American kids' camp songs. I tried to explain the lyrics to There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. I said, hearing the strangeness of it for the first time, "Anyway, it goes on like this til finally, she swallows a horse." The guy in the group asked, skeptical, "And she was okay?" And it was a shame that we were speaking Japanese and not English, because the translation wasted that perfect set-up for "she died, of course." It's funny, sort of, if it rhymes. If not, it's just bizarre.
The only thing missing was marshmallows. I would have brought some, but I didn't think of it til we were all staring into the embers around 10 pm. I could really use that round-the-clock camping butler.