My mother's idea of roughing it was a motel room that didn't have sub-zero air conditioning. I like to think I'm a hardier soul than that, but the older I get, the more I find myself suffering RV envy at the campground.

My husband and our youngest son try to camp out two or three weekends a month when the weather is right. The two oldest can't be bothered -- they have separation anxiety. I'm not sure what they're most afraid of being separated from -- their girlfriends, their XBox or their e-mail.

We aren't X-treme campers by any means. I don't like to cook on my electric range at home -- what makes you think I'm going to char bacon and torch marshmallows over an open flame?

No, we're spoiled. The campground we usually visit has a diner, a pool, a pool table and even a television in the clubhouse. The only time we're really "camping" is at night, when we retire to our tent and our queen-size air mattress. We don't even have real sleeping bags.

Even so, by morning, when the air has escaped the mattress and the heat has fled the tent, I feel as though I'm stranded in the freezing, cruel mountains with the Donner party. I ache in places I shouldn't be aching for at least another decade and I'm hungry enough to gnaw through one of those compressed granola-cement bars, even if it means chipping another tooth.

I stagger out of the tent, pine needles clinging to my sweatsuit like orphaned children, and my hair showing evidence of tornadic activity.

My neighbors -- in the RV -- step out, showered, shaved, fed and neat. I swear, if they had satin smoking jackets and ascots, they'd be wearing them, nibbling on kippers as they sit on the deck of their RV, watching the little people stagger blindly to the bathhouse.

"That's not real camping," my father would have snorted. Apparently, it only counts as "real" camping if bloodshed is involved -- blood from driving in tent stakes, cutting your own firewood, or accidentally punching your husband in the nose as you both try to navigate a tiny tent in the dark.

I have to disagree. It is camping. It's just luxury camping. You still wake to bird song and the sleepy greetings of you fellow campers -- if you can hear them over the sultry purr of your RV's sub-zero air conditioning.