Kids can find tramping difficult, but with patience and perseverance they will learn valuable lessons they can apply to the world outside the hills
A glorious thing happened the other day. Our youngest child Mackenzie enthusiastically accepted an invitation to join her good friend on a three day tramp. There will be six teenage girls and she is currently looking through her tramping wardrobe of holey long johns and hand-me-down polyprops to decide which outfit she can wear in front of other teens and still maintain a modicum of respectability. I suspect the odd ‘non-tramping’ article of clothing and maybe a body-spray or two will make an appearance in her pack. It’s an easy tramp on well-formed tracks so, provided she takes the necessary gear to be safe in untoward weather, I don’t care what she wears. I’m just ecstatic that our 14-year-old, whom over the years has gained the label ‘the reluctant tramper’, is eagerly anticipating a trip with her friends. To be fair, the reluctant tramper label is one that Mackenzie grew out of a few years back. She’s been spending time in the hills quite happily over the past couple of years without too many dramas, but it wasn’t always like that. When she was younger she was always the first to throw her toys out of the cot when things weren’t going right. She would sit down in the middle of a bush-bash and say ‘I’m not playing anymore’, and tell us loudly and clearly when the uphill was a struggle and she needed a rest. I don’t want to give the wrong impression though. Mackenzie did enjoy tramping – she was just very good at expressing her feelings when her level of discomfort had exceeded what she considered tolerable. And even though she was a very capable tramper she never really liked the idea of going so was often less than enthusiastic during the planning of a tramp (understatement of the year according to big sister). It came as a shock that we had a reluctant tramper in our family. It wasn’t in our plan of what our little tramping family would be like. We had done a bit of tramping with David’s eldest daughter Hannah and our other daughter Alice always loved it. What did we do wrong? [caption id="attachment_25613" align="aligncenter" width="1280"]