Camping in the great indoors: Rent a cabin in Florida

My boyhood cabin at Mallard Lake was nothing special. It was made of real logs, Abe Lincoln style, and had three bedrooms, though we kids were usually banished to the back porch that we shared with a couple of hundred hungry mice.

That's probably why there were so many snakes — copperheads and timber rattlers — hanging by the kitchen: no shortage of food. My father told my brothers and sisters and I to keep an eye out for the reptiles, especially come April when he would send one of us crawling under the cabin with a blowtorch to fix the pipes that froze during the winter.

But the hand pump in the kitchen always brought plenty of cool spring water from the lake, which also fed the toilet, which worked more often than not. Showers, however, had to be limited to a minute or two, lest the bather succumb to hypothermia.

Unfortunately, my family sold the upper New Jersey cabin in the late 1970s. My two older brothers thought about buying it.

"Phil was about 20 and I had just gotten out of the Navy," my brother Tim recalled. "He was convinced it was a gold mine because we could sell bottled water . . . he had the design for the label in his head and everything. Of course I told him, 'What are you, nuts, no one will ever pay for water!' "

With the cabin sold, I quickly became a tent camper. Over the years, I have slept on the ground everywhere from the jungles of South America to the mountains of New Zealand.

I vowed that whenever I ventured into the wilderness, I would rough it. Cabins were for sissies, I proclaimed to friends and families.

But I have had a change of heart.

Several years ago, I took my two small children to the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park in White Springs. I had heard about some new "cabins" that had been recently built, but was totally unprepared for what we found. These rustic shelters turned out to be nicer than most hotels. When it came time to go home, my kids did not want to leave.

"Can't we live here forever?" my son asked.

No, but we can come back a lot.

Terry Tomalin can be reached at tomalin@sptimes.com.