Thoughts on Camping

We’ve now been on two fairly successful camping trips with our pop-up. $$ aside, I’m very glad we bought it. The trips have been GREAT and I think it’s pretty safe to say we wouldn’t have gone camping without it. I can do without pretty well when it comes to camping … I don’t mind lack of electricity, showers, etc. but I LOVE my sleep and with the pop-up I finally can get sleep while camping. Yay!

Of course maybe the same thing could have been accomplished with a $60 cot from Bass Pro. I guess we’ll never know. Anyhow, here are some things I DO know so far about camping:

• Not a fan of Campsuds dish soap … does not cut grease worth crap unless you have hot water. This trip we used plain ol’ Dawn and collected our drainage in a grey-water bucket, which can be used to douse the fire, so no worries there. Some say Dr. Bronners (also biodegradable) is better, might check it out later.
• Just cooking alone makes plenty of dishes, so this trip we opted for paper plates/bowls for eating  … these can then be burned for kindling in the campfire. Saved us tons of water.
• This last trip I pre-cooked the bacon in the oven and just re-heated it on the stove. So much more fit in the pan and it was so quick! It could keep pace with my frantic pancake-making.
• I pre-mixed all the dry ingredients for recipes (pancakes, cornbread) and then marked them with the quantities of wet ingredients required. I also decanted the proper amounts of wet ingredients into other vessels to save space if needed.
• We purchased a big sports cooler to fill with drinking water and that helped me out a lot – I don’t tend to like the taste of water from other places and won’t drink as much as I need. That was Matt’s idea and it’s a very good one.
• Breakfast the last morning has been cereal with milk both times and I plan to keep it up – quick and easy while we pack up.
• We have both an LED lantern and several LED flashlights. They rock. They are small, compact, take few batteries, last forever and produce a ton of light (we didn’t get the brightest ones and I’m so glad because the ones we have can half blind you!).
• Planning and packing are super important. We found a packing list somewhere on the interwebs that we modified for our own use … if you’re interested, it is here in pdf and txt.

We’ve got one more trip tentatively planned for this year – hopefully the weather will hold! I’m sure we’ll continue to refine our camping as we go forward. We are collecting cool places to camp from friends and coworkers and I’m already getting excited about going next year. Many more places we want to see!