Camping on Twitter

So what did you get up to this weekend?

I went camping—in the woods, with my phone. After so much bed-and-breakfast fanciness, I was in the mood for some low-class peace and quiet and a bit of outdoor grit. Luckily, I didn’t have to travel that far.

Bronte Creek Provincial Park is a nice big square of wild green woods and pasture  surrounded on all sides by Canada’s most densely-populate corridor. Despite Toronto’s millions living less than thirty minutes away, I found the park surprisingly calm and clean.

Ontario is more wilderness than not—I realize that my options to camp are limitless.  There are far more wild places than the outskirts of Burlington, but that’s where I was and so that’s where I camped.

Spontaneous camping might just be the best kind of camping. With a rented tent and sleeping bag, I grabbed a kebab and a bag of marshmallows at the local Sobey’s and then disappeared from suburbia for twelve hours. The birds were as plentiful and sing-songy as a Disney cartoon and both day and night, I caught glimpses of unafraid raccoons and rabbits bouncing around as if they owned the place.

Because I was so close to the city, I had 4 fat bars on my iPhone, which allowed me to sit back and let all my followers tweet me ghost stories round the fire.

I promised to publish the best ghost story tweet (or at least the one that scared me the most):

@maybeblessed As Andrew slept, a green haze drifted his way. A face appeared, scarred & hollow looking. A hand reached out and . . .

Yeah, at eleven o’clock at night alone in the woods, that scared me, however a definite honorable mention goes to @ramblingstump, who must have been up late with her baby at the time:

@ramblingstump Once upon a time there was a baby. She looked like a normal baby but she never slept. Woooo. Much scarier than a #ghost story.

So thank you Monica and Nasreen, for your scary entertainment. For that reason, camping on Twitter was fun, in that although I was alone, I had hundreds of you to interact with out in the big black Canadian wilderness. In fact, besides almost dropping my phone in the fire once or twice, I’d say it was a smashing success.