Camping for the birds (not me)

Maybe a dermatologist could explain the condition, but the instant my wife says she has an itch to go camping I start getting itchy all over.

You could say I consider her urge rash.

I’ve never been more determined to do my part to save the environment. This is odd because the older I get the less I want to do anything that involves spending time out in it.

During bug-infested summer especially, I’ll take the good indoors over the great outdoors any day. Or night.

Summer is now the meanest season. The heat, the bugs, the explosive storms. It makes even bitter winter seem charming by comparison.

Yet once a summer Val insists we take the girls camping, as if failure to do so is some kind of neglect.

In fact, camping is by most standards very neglectful behavior.

Think about it. We’re taking the girls away from everything they love and exposing them to dangerous wilderness and well-armed rednecks intent on protecting themselves from the toothy varmints that would leave them alone if they just stayed on their porches.

Making the girls spend nights out in the woods is even more cruel than taking them to visit my in-laws.

Sure, they’re monsters, but at least in-laws have refrigerated sodas, indoor plumbing, rooms with doors, hi-def TV, and saintly men and women who’ll bring hot pizza right to their home. To our daughters, those are the very hallmarks of civilization.

It would all make sense if Val hated our daughters, but there’s ample evidence that is not the case. She’s a wonderful mother and the girls really love her.

Me, they sort of tolerate.

I’m good for giggles, but the main reason they put up with my often over-bearing presence is the same reason their mother does.

I get lots of free vacations in glamorous places.

For all my many professional failings, I’ve somehow become one of those writers lucky enough to have carved out a giddy little niche as a travel writer.

That’s how I ended up with an understanding that, when it comes to vacations, my daughters are more like me than their dear Mommy.

This realization was hammered home last summer when the 5-year-old complained that the TV in our accommodations was too tiny.

Oh, she was missing the big picture, all right.

We were shacking up at Far Away Point at St. Michael’s on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. I was doing a story about the splendid advantages of renting your own mansion for a week.

Built in 1928, Far Away Point is a secluded estate. The brochures said it sleeps 12, but we could’ve invited Delaware over for a kegger and there’d still be plenty of room for Vermont to crash.

It had a seven-person guest house, a boathouse, a Steinway piano room, an old-fashioned four-flight elevator, 100-acres with a half-mile of shore line on the Miles River, a private beach, and a historic graveyard full of nearly two dozen dead millionaires.

There wasn’t a tent pole in sight.

And it had one crappy little TV. It was about the size of my old Flintstones lunchbox and got very poor reception. That, to some, is a selling point. It’s meant to emphasize a retreat from technological intrusions where families could re-connect with each other instead of things like iCarly.

But my little princesses were appalled.

Their spoiled reaction is why I’ll again succumb to the ordeal of camping one sweltering weekend soon.

I believe my daughters and I will bond over the deprivations of having to endure the mosquitoes, the snakes, the lousy toilets and other inherent miseries associated with camping.

They’ll realize the Mommy they adore is, like the man she married, flawed. It’ll help even the playing field. I’ll remind them of all the snazzy places I’ve taken them and tuck them into their sleeping bags with promises that the next place we stay will have gourmet chocolates on the pillows.

Then I’ll plan to seize the initiative by securing the girls three nights in another mansion someplace splendid. And I promise you this:

This one will have a bigger TV.

A grave story about cemeteries

Forgot to mention one other amenity on the grounds of our 81-acre mansion.

It had a cemetery.

That’s not so unusual. Our back lawn, for instance, has a cemetery. It’s the eternal resting place of two hermit crabs and two frogs, whose names I never bothered to learn, and of Buster, the 18-year-old cat who finally expired in 2007.

My eyes still mist over whenever I look at where I buried Buster -- certainly not for sentimental reasons. I think it’s residual sting from the barrels of ammonia I used to clean the stinking litter box of an animal I never liked.

There’s nothing really very sacred about our little pet cemetery and the kids wouldn’t care if I clipped too close with the John Deere, which I do whenever I ever feel like taunting Buster’s still-foul-breathed spirit, I’m sure.

The cemetery at Far Away Point wasn’t the final resting place of neglected and disliked animals.

No, buried there were about 20 dead millionaires.

You can tell you have a spacious property when you say, sure, go ahead and plant Uncle Fred out under the willow way out back.

Having so many dead relatives on my lawn would be emotionally disruptive to my peace of mind.

I’d miss a few of them and that would make me sad. I’d be forever agitated realizing that one or two of them probably died owing me some money. And there’d be a few whose deaths brought me comfort and I’d feel like a bad person every time I silently rejoiced at the site of their tombstones.

And those are just my people. There’d bound to be in-laws in among the mortal mix.

Having their graves so tauntingly near would test my conscience every time my bladder filled.

It’ll be an odd recollection, but one of our liveliest vacations will be surrounded by memories of graves.

We stayed Sunday evening at a perfectly comfortable Holiday Inn Express in Annapolis.

It is nearly surrounded by tombstones. It’s in one of those old neighborhoods where urban sprawl was rapacious enough to devour even the graves.

Well, most of them.

Right behind the hotel is a traditional walled cemetery up against the delivery docks of a trendy Whole Foods Market. Then right there on the traffic island separating Riva and West roads is a cemetery with about 15 tombstones.

It’s one of the oddest cemeteries I’ve ever seen. It is just right there in the traffic triangle. It seems so disrespectful, not to mention dangerous. It was loud. Exhaust fumes choked the air. I swear if you listened closely you could hear the coffins coughin’.

Then right down the street was a military cemetery so respectful it wouldn’t surprise me to learn they buried the dead standing at attention. The rows were immaculate, the lawns well kept.

Like the haircuts of the sailors buried there, it was all high and tight.

A nice cemetery is supposed to be all about the view. But whose view?

The dearly departed’s? That makes no sense. Toes up is the default burial position for even those of us who’ve spent our lives sleeping in fetal positions. Everyone, at least those with supernatural vision, is either looking at the sky and straight up the nostrils of anyone paying their respects.

If we truly cared about the comfort and the view of our late loved ones we’d bury them all in adirondack chairs from the neck down, a posture that would certainly challenge the weed-whacking skills of any hungover groundskeepers.

What’s to become of me?

After much careful consideration, I think I’m going to ask I be buried on a busy traffic island.

My tombstone will read, “Honk If You Miss Me!”, offering a drive-by sort of mourning. Truck backfires will seem like 21-gun salutes. And any refuse that collects against my stone will be trashy tribute to a tree hugger who spent so much of his life stooping to pick up the litter of others.

Best of all, anyone who felt the urge to urinate on my grave -- and there’s bound to be a line -- will likely get run over by errant bread trucks before they even get their hands on their zippers.

I’ll be sure to rest in peace knowing I’ve greatly reduced the chances I’ll, yuck, rest in pee.

Our mansion vacation

We’d finished our meals at a place so sumptuous it makes Dick Cheney cheerful when Lucy became momentarily agreeable and said she wanted to return to our mansion.

There, a line that seems so strewn with lies and exaggerations, is 100 percent truth.

We did have a mansion, Lucy was momentarily agreeable and, yes, Virginia, there is a place where Cheney’s cheerful.

It’s St. Michaels, Maryland. We just spent the last three days there.

I don’t know which of the aforementioned truths is more surprising, so let’s get to the one that’s most monumental.

Let’s get right to the mansion.

It was Far Away Point (homes have addresses; mansions, like pets and people, all have names and personalities).

It just sold for $6.1 million and rents for the week for $6,500. 

Far Away Point has six bedrooms, six baths, library, pool, bath house, 81 acres, boat dock, guest house (sleeps 8), and a shoreline overlooking the same Chesapeake Bay eastern shore waters as recent retirees Cheney and Don Rumsfeld.

I was there to research a story about mansion rentals in a place that’s home to two men who think they’ve never been wrong and how with their selection of St. Michael’s as the perfect place to retire they got at least one thing right.

Doesn’t quite make up for the whole Iraq War thingie, but let’s give the devils their due.

I remain amazed I was able to stay there without having committed any crimes.

We didn’t break in. We were invited.  I didn’t pretend I was someone else. I was legit. We weren’t supervised. We were so all alone the girls spent most of the time there skinny dipping.

As our host drove up the mile-long driveway, I had the uneasy sense I was about to become Jack Torrance from “The Shining.”

That disquiet was only heightened when after a full 25-minute tour, Lucy, 4 (5 next week!) looked with dead eyes at me and said, “We’ve been here before.”

Far Away Point is 93 years old.

That’s Lucy. She has just three speeds: Spooky, sweet or Satanic (nickname, Lucy-fer).

Then, as soon as the realtor departed, Josie got locked in Far Away Point’s elevator, or as we now call it, the “hellavator.”

It was one of those old, rickety, self-operated three-story numbers that are kid magnets. Both the outer and sliding doors need to be closed for it to run.

Josie, naturally, thought it would be the perfect toy. She took it from the second floor to the first.

Then the outer door wouldn’t budge. Then the light went out.

She started screaming. I yelled, “Don’t panic!” and immediately commenced to panic. I yanked with all my might, I twisted coat hangers, I looked around for a fire ax.

She was in there about 10 minutes. We called the caretaker and the realtor and got no answer. Val finally persuaded her to push the buttons again. The lift had been off the landing. It needed to descend two more inches for the doors to release.

We were off to a frightening start.

But it got better right away.

If there were malevolent spirits in the house intent on retrieving our souls for eternal damnation, I think we won them over. They saw we were friendly. They saw we had no ill-intentions. They saw Val naked.

The girls were naked nearly the whole time. Me, a veteran skinny dipper, was envious.

It soon became one of our best vacations ever. It was magical.

The mansion soon felt like home. It embraced us. We all relaxed and just reveled in the opportunity to have such freedom in something so regal.

In the end, the girls decided they preferred our own home for perfectly 21st century reasons.

For all its glories, it’s many books and lavish places to relax and read, Far Away Point has but one measly TV and it’s about the size of a chess board.

Our home may be tiny and under-furnished, but it has three glorious TVs, one of them a real whopper, and all three could kick the butt of the one in Far Away Point.

Who needs mansions when you have hi-def?

For me the best part was overcoming our initial fears and learning to love this big, old beautiful house on the shore. Our memories of it will never fade.

And to think I for even a fleeting moment believed that true evil lurked in the heart of the home, an evil so malignant that it could possess our very souls.

How wrong I was.

I must have been confusing Far Away Point with down the street at Cheney’s place.