Remember summer camp? Remember reveille at 6:30? Remember the swim instructor who wouldn’t let you go to lunch until you jumped into the icy water over your head? Remember arts and crafts and the various mysteries of beads, lariats, and decoupage? Remember the communal toilets and showers? Most of all, remember those tents set up on platforms? Good news! Now you can pay a cool $500 a night to relive the experience you thought you had left safely in your youth.
Okay, if you’re glamping, you will likely have an en suite toilet and shower, so you don’t have rely on the promised “forest bathing” experience that’s offered along with yoga, fireside chats, live acoustic music, and guided meditation classes. There’s a heater and fan for climate control, even if there doesn’t seem to be a lot of mosquito netting. You’ll get your own fire pit. They’ll even lend you a hiking pole for free
So, am I just being a curmudgeon if I point out you can get most of those amenities — minus the forest bathing and yoga, of course, at any mid-list hotel chain for a quarter of the price? Not to mention you get air conditioning and screens in your window. And free breakfast.
But my real quarrel with glamping is, it’s nothing new. We’ve had glamping here in Woodstock, ever since 1908 when the indefatigable George Mead, proprietor of Mead’s Mountain House, “at the earnest solicitation of guests, erected several large water and weatherproof tents, distributing them in delightful locations convenient to the main building and yet giving the occupants an opportunity of living an open air, camp life… These tents are furnished with woven wire iron cots, bedding, carpets, mats, etc. All tent parties have the same privileges as though rooming in the house.” So naturally, rates for the tents were the same as those charged for rooms.
At least, in the case of the Mountain House, it might be argued that the tents were cooler than the indoor rooms, despite the ingenious Mr. Mead’s having also “arranged a series of galvanized iron pipe coils for a system by which the guests may have pure ice cooled spring water at all times without its direct contact with ice.” The mountain house also offered “a separate building devoted to shower baths, a luxury not found in many summer resorts,” which might have made up for inconvenience of the midnight trek to use the indoor toilets. Meals were included and “The cuisine, though unpretentious, is wholesome and liberal… Milk, vegetables, and country produce are raised on the premises.” Did I just here someone say “farm to table”?
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