Take my camper and my flange nuts

Well, our camping days are officially over.

Actually, they were over three summers ago. While it was lots of fun while it lasted the boys had outgrown camping, I was working more and more on weekends and the campground where many of our friends now camp at is a 60-second drive from our house.

“You should come camping,” they’d tell me.

I’d point to the trees in the direction of my house and say, “Honestly, I live right there.”

So I just visit instead.

In the past week we’ve sold our camper. On Monday she left with her new people headed for her new home.

I’ve already got plans for the space the camper occupied in our driveway. They involve patio stone, a fire pit, a gazebo, etc, etc. (Maybe this is why my husband wasn’t overly anxious to sell the camper.)

Biding adieu to the camper, however, reminds me of a task I took on a few years ago around this time when I decided to put together our new barbecue for the campground.

A remember at the time a friend had lamented that the barbecue he was putting together had more parts that an F-18. I admit I was apprehensive when I decided to put my own together. But my husband was heading out on a fishing trip and I figured my Father’s Day gift to my dad could be me not asking him to put my barbecue together.

I had to wonder at the time if it is the goal of sadistic barbecue manu- facturers to frighten people from the get-go? It’s pretty bad when the diagram of labeled parts runs out of letters of the alphabet and has to skip into Part AA, all the way to Part JJ. There were also 158 screws, nuts and washers that I would use to assemble all of these parts – or so said the instructions.

An hour into the process and it was starting to look like a barbecue, albeit a wobbly one so I went back and retightened all of the flange nuts attached to the end of the screws. Two hours into the process and I was still tightening flange nuts, which was funny considering that up until two hours earlier I had never heard of a flange nut.

Then came the moment of truth two-and-a-half hours into the process. I dropped the fire pit into place. It didn’t fit.

My first thought was someone sold me a shoddy barbecue. But then reality sunk in and I knew the more likely scenario was my construction was shoddy.

I pulled out the instructions and saw at Step 2, I had assembled the two sides of the barbecue backwards. And now here I was at Step 45, which felt like Step 345.

I could have cried. Actually I did cry because now I had to take apart 90 per cent of what I had put together in the last two-and-a-half hours. I was really regretting my decision to have retightened all of those flange nuts.

It was 11 p.m. and I thought about quitting. But then I thought about my smug smile when I did finish and told everyone, “Look at what I did!” Remarkably it’s much faster to put a barbecue together the second time around, although I don’t recommend this.

When I was nearly finished I remember thinking to myself that I never wanted to see another flange nut in my life. I didn’t even care that there were two left over.

Let’s live dangerously!

At 12:20 a.m. – three hours and 50 minutes after I began – I finally finished.

The next night at the campground the kids and some friends and I had our inaugural supper on the barbecue. There were enough burgers for each of us to have two. At least that was the plan. As everyone was grabbing their first burger my son Justin knocked over his glass of fruit punch into the platter of barbecued burgers. They were literally floating. Three hours and 50 minutes spent putting a barbecue together and this is how our first meal ends – in a platter of fruit punch marinated burgers.

How appetizing.

And now the camper is gone. At least I still have the barbecue to remember our camping day.

And the flange nuts.