A bird pooped on my head and down my shirt this last Sunday, which only further bolsters my long brewing animosity towards nature. I’m not a happy camper, quite literally, and I’ve never understood why sleeping outside of four walls and a roof is any more magical than driving out to a location well beyond the lights of the city to marvel at the stars and then returning to a place with a hot shower and clean sheets. I don’t need or have any desire to wake up, dirty, with a creaky back and caffeine withdrawal, only to hike back to my overheated car, no thank you.

Two of my fellow ‘paloozians had milestone birthdays within two days of each other this week, and though I will not repeat that scary number (scary at least to single girls with pet children), it rhymes with worty, which no one wants to be except Madonna who, in a fit of good Kabbalah luck was “enlightened” at worty. 

Anyway, in an impromptu celebration of these two women, a few of our rag tag crew drove up north of Santa Barbara to a very beautiful state park and went glamping. No, that was not a typo; we went “glamorous camping”, which I would argue, is as much an oxymoron as jumbo shrimp. What exactly is glamping you ask? Glamping basically consists of a few steps. One: drive to a very nice campground in your Prius  (for the record and as I stated earlier, the environment and I are not exactly facebook friends, so obviously the Prius belongs to someone else-- I prefer my cars to get less than 14 MPG) which will be weighted down with three ice chests full of such necessities as carrot cake, israeli couscous salad, artisanal goat cheese, truffle sausage and fig jam. Next, pay the nice lady in the log cabin the cost of a very nice piece of furniture for two nights, spend the next hour unpacking the car and then apply bug spray before settling in to your posh camp house, which is really just a re-branded mobile home made to look like a log cabin. And finally, after all this, order your BBQ kit consisting of hamburger, fixins, tools and ingredients to make s’mores, to be delivered directly to your fire pit for dinner.