Every ten years or so, I decide it’s time to go camping. I think I want to like camping much more than I do.

We took my visiting grandsons on a camping trip last weekend, but we opted for a more glamping kind of experience. We decided to rent an RV. I fondly remember an RV camping trip my own family had taken when I was a kid and I wanted my grandsons to have this kind of memory stored in their minds—of travel and the excitement of new places and the lure of the great outdoors.

When we pulled up to our rental in Ohio, the RV looked like everything we had hoped it would be. But the interior was another story. It was filthy. The blinds were broken, the cupboards were scratched and the floors harbored big gouge marks. Glass was missing from built-in dresser doors, the windshield was cracked and the carpeted floors had a layer of clear duct tape on top. And the whole place smelled.

The man who rented us the RV was a big bear of a man and he was a piece of work. I don’t think he ever entered a situation he didn’t try to manipulate with his big smile and endless happy banter. He tried to make us think all RV rentals look this way.

We were ready to call it a day, but we were stuck. Hours from home, and with two little grandkids looking up at us with big hopeful eyes, we struck up a deal. I would clean the RV enough to make it sleepable and he would discount our entire trip. There was not a hotel for miles around that had a room, being that we were in Ohio’s “vacationland” region in the middle of July.

The minute we tried to set up camp, the air conditioning stopped working and we noticed there was a large leak under the sink spilling out onto the floor. I called the company who had hosted our rental and complained, and it wasn’t long before the owner pulled up on his immaculate Harvey Davidson motor scooter to offer us the world if only we would stay. He offered us a 100% refund and four tickets to nearby Cedar Point Amusement Park.

None of those promises ever came to pass.

In the meantime, a whole bottle of olive oil had spilled onto everything in our big food bin, and I spent several hours trying to salvage its contents. “What was I thinking?” I wondered. “When have I ever been camping and come home thinking it was the best thing ever?”

I had brought tablecloths and candles and placemats and set out to make the best of an unpleasant situation. We made a lovely dinner, built a nice campfire and had s’mores. No one wanted to sing my camp songs, though, or tell scary stories. The sky was not awash in stars. I sat on a melted marshmallow. The air conditioner sounded like a freight train the entire night as we tossed and turned in our dirty beds.

And kids these days are not as in awe of things as we were when I was young. They’ve been to LegoLand, to Disney World, to Key West, to ocean-side cottages, and exotic islands and giant forests all in their own little lifetimes. They’ve already done a lot of living. Sitting at an RV campsite with their grandparents didn’t have the same cache it might have had fifty years ago.

Our saving grace was our trip to Put In Island on Saturday. I’m not sure why so few of us in New York State know about it, but it’s a true gem. You take a ferry over to the island, rent a golf cart for the day, and put your way around the shoreline road, stopping at restaurants, Victorian-era shops, and beautiful 19th century homes. It is Martha’s Vineyard on Lake Erie and it’s worth the trip.

I can’t tell you how good it was to get home. Our little house in Lakewood was a welcome sight. The older I get, the more I appreciate the simplicity of the life we’ve built.

I get camping. I really do. But the people who seem to enjoy it the most have mastered the Martha Stewart version of it, where all the comforts of home have been incorporated into their camping experience. One seasonal campsite we saw had a big built-in outdoor bar complete with tiki lights and a beautiful tent covering it. Some people had French doors on the back of their RV with a little patio, and one RV had its own outdoor kitchen.

But the rest of us have to kind of shlep our way through our time in the great outdoors, cleaning spilled oil off of everything, heating water to clean the skillet, and hoping our RV rental is not something right out of a Chevy Chase movie.

I think it’s my last time camping. But it was certainly a poignant goodbye.