Pit Toilets

    Over the weekend we went camping, which is part of the reason I haven’t been posting.  No worries because I intend to catch up so I can finish the Ultimate Blogging Challenge in epic style with my 31 posts!   I love camping and it was the first time all summer we have went to an actual campground.  Sure there have been plenty of nights out in the camper outside our back door, but we never actually went anywhere.

     We packed our gear and headed to the Eby Pines Campground in Bristol, Indiana.  They have a ginormous swimming pool that has a water slide my son loves and a huge water umbrella you can swim under.  I digress though.  Nearby our campsite was the traditional pit toilet.  This year the campground had erected a fancy new building over the pit toilet site complete with electric lights.    Thinking this might not be so bad, my kids and I made a beeline for the pit toilet with an urgent need to pee.  I was impressed until I walked into the door.  Sure it was clean enough, but as soon as you opened the door, and in some cases before that, you were bowled over by an eye watering, gag reflex stench that literally took your breath away!!  A person literally had to hold your breath to pee then vault for the door as if shot off the shitter by a canon.  The smell was that bad.  What could I possibly expect from a pit toilet?

 

    As my son marveled how far down his pee had to drop, I wondered how much more money it would have taken to have an electric fan installed along with that nice building and  those electric lights.  Can we get some ventilation please?  Perhaps an industrial sized can of Febreeze?  What is the point of building such a fine structure and installing electric lights and a hand sanitizer dispenser if you fail to provide some form of ventilation?  From that moment on we walked a little farther to the shower house to do our business skirting a wide path around the reeking pit toilet.

      I love to camp but I have got to have a clean toilet devoid of God awful shit and urine smell.  It is a must.  Even if a person squatted behind a tree to take a leak you would have better air quality than that.  Since I am traipsing into those menopausal years I always have to pee in the middle of the night so my daughter always makes the trek to the bathroom with me when we are at the campground.  Even if she doesn’t have to go, by the time we get there, she probably will.  

       The moon and stars were bright in the sky and we were singing “I’m walking in the moonlight” and laughing our fool heads off all the way.  Not another soul seemed to be stirring except for us.  As we neared the pit toilet we noticed this creepy woman that appeared quite not all there staring at the pit toilet but making no moves to enter or retreat. Maybe she was waiting for someone, maybe she was wondering whether she should stay, or whether she should go,  whatever the case, we walked a little quicker and sang a little quieter with a bounce in our step and a song in our hearts.