It’s hard for me to believe that I used to love camping.

And I don’t mean the kind of camping where you travel around in an air-conditioned luxury RV.

I mean the kind of camping where you either pitched a tent or bunked up in a cabin.

Now, the closest thing I do that even compares to camping is when I stay with dear friends in their home on the farm.

Camping became less attractive to me when I hit puberty and realized I liked boys.

Before that, I had no problem waking up with a Phyllis Diller hairdo — (for those of you too young to know who Phyllis Diller is, Google her), wearing a hand-painted macaroni necklace or walking around with calamine lotion all over my bug-bitten legs.

But when boys came into focus and the thought of having no electrical outlet for the blow dryer or telephone service came across my mind, camping became a thing of the past.

However, memories flood back to my good old camping days every time I encounter a pine tree.

Its smell immediately transports me back to the campfires that were built, the songs that were sung and the fellowship of a group of girls that will always be near and dear.

I was in Girl Scout Troop 229 with Ida Haworth and Susan Embry as the leaders. Those two women took us on countless campouts. One summer, we camped all the way to Washington D.C. and back.

It was very educational. On our way, we made a stop in Savannah, Ga., the birthplace of Juliette Gordon Low, who was the founder of Girl Scouts and we toured Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello in Virginia.

In those pre-boy years, I was also a camper at Warner Tully — one year even serving as a counselor in training, and as with my Girl Scout days, those years there were also great.

Summertime is a reprieve from school for kids with some attending camps and for others, it is a time to enjoy a family vacation.

In the upcoming July/ August edition of the Vicksburg Living Magazine, we are once again reaching out to readers to become a part of the magazine by sending us a photograph of a favorite vacation or camp picture. These pictures can be current or vintage and we need them soon, like by today. Thankfully with the internet, this is possible.

You are welcome to email the pictures directly to me at terri.frazier@vicskburgpost.com or to www.vicksburgpost.com/summerfun.

Although camping is not on my to-do list anymore, I relish the memories and will never consider those days any less fun than the vacations I take now where there is running water and air-conditioning.