continued from Camping/Glamping (Part 1)

In Part 1, I explained how we’d accidentally discovered naturism on one of our first holidays together as a couple. In Part 2, I’m going to continue our unfolding adventure.

We stopped by a river and as we were eating lunch it occurred to us that we could maybe go skinny dipping. So we did! 🙂

At the time we were still using a Polaroid camera that produced instant photos, we were still pre-digital back then, so we took photos of each other after the swim, not the first naked photos we’d taken of each other, but the first in a public environment.

We’ve tried to replicate those first photographs within Second Life (below).

Yes, we did keep our helmets on to remain anonymous, lol.

(Ella adds: Thanks to Harry for the post production that allowed the photos to be presented in a Polaroid style)

Not every night on that holiday was spent at a naturist campsite, sometimes it just seemed too far to ride in a single day to reach one, but about half of the remainder of the holiday was spent on naturist campsites, and we spent our first day on a naturist beach on that same trip.

A couple of years later we got married and then children came along, by which time we were pretty committed naturists at home and abroad. In the period before the kids were born we’d set off on the bike and had usually picked a place where we could probably get a naked swim or sunbathe in.

While the weather may be against us often, Ireland is a potential naturist paradise when the sun shines. Wheel the bike into this field, park it against the tree and walk down to a beach where you can almost certainly use it, undisturbed, for hours on end.

Co. Galway, Renvyle Beach. If using this for a skinny dip you could see someone coming half a mile away and cover up if you thought it likely you’d offend anyone’s sensibilities.

Co. Donegal. The trick is to go midweek. You might have this place to yourself for the entire day once a few dog walkers have used it in the morning.

Once the kids came along, though, we needed something better suited to family life than a motorbike, so we bought a camper van instead.

It’s not as convenient as the bike, but there’s two willing sets of grandparents who are more than happy to take the kids for the most of a day (they’re in their mid-teens now, so not much looking after is required) while Mary and I still stick our leathers on and head off on the bike like we used to. After many happy naturist holidays with them in France, and weekends at home, they’ve now sadly reached that body-conscious teenage where the idea of going naked themselves, or seeing Mum and Dad go naked horrifies them. Happily for Mary and me they’re all off to a summer camp this year, so I’m currently getting the camper van spruced up for two weeks in which we plan to your as much of Ireland’s coastline as we can, skinny dipping, naked camping and sunbathing (weather permitting) as we can!

Jem

Glamping may conceivably be a word which hasn’t travelled far beyond the confines of Ireland and the UK. A Google search would suggest this to be so, with few references to glamping in the US, although the wide open highways and sparsely populated regions of vast tracts of land make it ideal for use of an RV, a recreational vehicle, which would almost certainly provide many of the more luxurious amenities associated with glamping in Ireland, the UK and parts of Europe.

Glamping, in case you didn’t know, is a portmanteau word comprising glamorous and camping, thus ‘glamping’. It’s camping with a bit of luxury thrown in.

Typically, you might stay in a proper bed in a tree house. We can actually do this close to home. Staying in a yurt is also very popular amongst ‘glampers’.

There are a few campsites dotted around SL, and you can even rent a yurt to live in, should you choose to do so. Campsites, while not advertising themselves as ‘glamp sites’, do have some lovely looking tents and facilities in SL that would put them firmly inside the ‘glamping’ category (see photos below).

A Second Life yurt

Mary, my wife, and I started off our holidays together on a motorcycle and a couple of panniers attached. We’d take off to France by ferry and then stop at one of the thousands, literally thousands of campsites dotted around that country. One website claims there are 9289 campsites in the country. Given the amount of them you can find I’d say it’s probably an accurate figure, and there are maps you can buy, sometimes get for free, that show all campsites in a region. You can stop for lunch at a lovely little French cafe and plot the afternoon’s biking, knowing you can check in, pay not too many euros and throw your tent up. Some are very well appointed, with on-site restaurants dealing in top quality food, shower and toilet blocks and small shops for camping essentials you’ve maybe run out of or forgotten to bring.

Not all of them are naturist. It was on one of those early holidays, I think we were 18 or 19, that we actually discovered naturism when we checked into a naturist campsite by mistake. We knew what naturism was, of course, but had never thought of ourselves as being naturist. Mary says I read the map wrong, I say Mary read the map wrong, but we checked into a naturist site in error. I think we’d both have got on the bike and headed onto the one we planned to stay at, but it was late and I’d been driving the bike all day, and I knew I was getting too tired to bike onwards safely.

So we pitched our tent, stripped off, wrapped towels around ourselves and headed off to the nearby shower block to freshen up. It was a hell of a shock to find the showers were unisex, in our innocence we thought there’d be male and female blocks. So I had to stand guard while Mary showered and then wrapped herself in a towel again!

We got back to our tent as the light faded, so we were able to sit outside the tent and eat some supper, planning the following day’s ride by torchlight. It felt really good, to me, to be outside, naked, and warm at night. I told Mary that I liked the feeling and was a bit surprised when she said she did too. I though she’d have been much more reticent about being naked in a public setting, even though no one could actually see us.

We got up at dawn the following morning and even though it was first light there were a few people swimming in a river that ran through the site. We sort of reached that ‘I will if you will’ moment and we opted to run down to the river and jump in too. It was completely exhilarating. Watching the sunrise, being naked outdoors, swimming in a river. We pretty much giggled all the way back to our tent, feeling rather proud of ourselves.

We set off the next day to follow what was the itinerary we’d planned, but at some point along the road I felt a tap on my helmet, a signal that Mary wanted to say something. This was almost 20 years ago, we were young, and my bike didn’t stretch to communications between our helmets. I stopped and Mary told me she’d rather liked the morning skinny dip and the entirely unexpected exposure to naturism and could we tear up our itinerary and rethink it? Sure we could.

We bought some bread and cheese in the next village, drove out to a nearby river and sat down to re-think the holiday.

(continued in Camping/Glamping Part 2)