I tried that and it was a disaster - the bags melted, even though they were fully immersed in the water - the one that just contained plain egg was OK - the others - which had fatty stuff in them like chunks of Chorizo dissolved and ruined dinner.
We “wash” the caked on gunk off of silverware, spatulas etc by shoving them in and out of the sand as well. I forgot about this one 
It has to be on a low boil at a max. Anything above that – the bags can melt on the bottom of the pan, even with the water as those lil coleman stoves are put out a lot of btu’s and your campware pots aren’t known for effectively spreading the heat.
It does help to move them around. But the fact you don’t have to pay much attention to them is the bonus to me.
To be fair, I think the bags I used were a bit cheap and weedy.
If you can afford it, invest in a good quality fridge like an Engel or Waeco. I took out three quarters of my back seat and installed an 80 litre Waeco. I also had a dual battery system installed. If I’m parked, I can run the fridge for a full day and then still have a battery to start with.
A good First Aid kit is a must, including BurnShield in tubes for those kettle burns upthread.
Trash bags tend to break and spill. Over here we have Wolff Packs (based on ammo boxes) which we use to pack all our gear. Use one of them as a trash box. Line it with your usual trash bag.
I’m a big fan of metal buckets for fetching and carrying water, and then heating over the fire.
Bicarbonate of Soda for brushing teeth, neutralising battery acid, and can be used as a very effective underarm deodorant.
Pine cones burn well.
A full size spade is a permanent fixture on my vehicle. Grind one side of the spade to a fine edge and you have a spade that doubles as an axe.
Big group trip. Folks going down early take and set up tents for others who will get there late. One bunch of late arrivers drives through campground several times looking for familiar tent, finally check out one that looks sort of like one person’s. Finally figure out that Mary’s tent was set up with Joe’s poles, Joe’s tent and Mary’s poles are stashed under a picnic table. Hilarity ensues.
For hanging LARGE tarps up as a rain shelter, we recently discovered a way to keep the grommets on the corners from tearing out.
Thread your rope through the grommets, alternating which way you go through each one. Once you’ve done that, tie an overhand knot (make a loop, tie that into a knot) just before the ‘top’ grommet (before the end of the tarp), and another for the ‘bottom’ just after the tarp. Tie both ends up. This helps eliminate the sags along the long edges as well. Do this on two opposite sides.
The ropes should leave the tarp at about 45 degree angles from the edges. Adjust so that you have one of the unroped edges slightly lower, and away from your camping area (and DOWNHILL), to let the rain run off.
I wish I could draw it, but it’ll make sense once you do it. Such a simple solution, and it only took me 20 years of camping to figure out. I’ll never do it a different way again.
I second the first aid kit. With everything.
Three years ago we were fishing at camp, and my son hooked a regular barbed fishhook through my cheek. No amount of pulling would let it come back through. We cut off the end and pulled and got it out.
And people wonder why I get tetanus shots so frequently.
My truck always has a spade and around 100 feet of chain in it. Can’t tell you the number of times I’ve used both when camping.
When we camp (which is generally quite rustic), we tend to make a small “cooking fire” hearth with a few flat stones. Only after dinner is cooked do we attempt to do the bonfire/fire pit thing.
A small hearth is very easy to cook on without burns or, worse, upsetting your food. The flat stones should be close enough together so that you can put a pot over the fire while it is sitting over the stones. If suitable flat stones are not available, use green logs flattened on top with the axe.
I say this, because I grew up in a family who went camping regularly and we made cooking fires as a matter of course. Then one day I went camping with some friends. One volunteered to “get the fire started and start cooking” while the rest of us did other chores. I came back to find that he had made a roaring bonfire, on which he was frantically attempting to position a frying pan and a coffee pot, without incinerating himself or the food, or spilling the coffee into the fire - a difficult bit of juggling. To me, it seemed obvious that this wasn’t the best way to go about cooking, but evidently to many a campfire = a big bonfire (which admittedly is a lot of fun, just not great for cooking on, other than hot dogs).
One useful trick I learned: one of the hardest things to do is to make a fire in wet weather. Obviously the best way to deal with this is to have dry firewood under cover before it gets wet, but this isn’t always possible. How to start a fire if you lack dry wood or an accellerant? One natural solution is to look for a big, useless-looking old pine stump. The outer wood may be rotten, but often the inner wood is saturated with pine sap, and damn near solid. We called this stuff “fatwood” and it will burn in any weather - it is impervious to wet. Use a knife or axe to cut shavings from it for kindling; use larger pieces to dry out other wood.
Fatwood is not good for cooking on itself, because it burns with a very oily, greasy flame. It is great for getting other wood started though.
The guts of an old top-loader washing machine makes a terrific (and safe) fireplace for bush camping. Perched on a couple of rocks or bricks, with all the draught holes and a grate on top, it keeps the fire hot and contained…a must for any camping in fire-prone regions. The ‘hole’ is also the perfect size for a large frypan or wok if you are camping-light and don’t want to carry a grate.
A good fridge is absolutely essential if you don’t want to go through a block of ice every day in hot weather (you can’t buy dry-ice here in Aus). Invest in a super-expensive 7 Day Ice Chest (like an Engel as has been mentioned) and you’ll save not only the cost of ice but on the absence of spoiled food too. Nothing worse than fishing around in the icy-sludge to find a sodden cucumber or tomato for the salad for dinner!!
Always buy good quality tent pegs. The cheapo lightweight ones are false economy because regardless of the state of the dirt you hammer them into, they ALWAYS fuck up. Ditto with tarps. Invest in decent ones and you’ll have them for years instead of just one camping trip.
A chainsaw is an absolute necessity. A generator isn’t, unless your ‘camping trip’ also includes the telly, microwave and the hairdryer. I DID try to tell this to The Bloke before we went on our holiday camp a few weeks ago, but he was not convinced…and the friggin’ generator took up nearly half the space of everything else combined. In the end, we used it just to charge my mobile phone. What is it with blokes and new shiney things that make noise? 
Anyway, I won’t let it happen again. Next time it’s either me, or the generator.
I’m trying to understand this. Are you talking about threading the rope through all the grommets along a side of the tarp, in a sewing motion? And then tying a knot at the end grommets to keep the tarp from slinding/sagging along the rope?
Yeah, I’m also not too keen on the generator angle. You don’t win many friends with the noise they produce.
I’m busy putting together a solar kit. Using the ubiquitous Wolff Pack, I’ll be fitting it with a deep cycle car battery, charger and 220V invertor. On the lid I’ll be mounting a single solar panel. This then gets loaded on the roof rack and the battery charges whilst driving (sun willing, of course). When parked, I can then take it off the roof rack and let it stand in the sun to charge.
This way you have a quiet, renewable 220V power source for running the fridge, charging AA batteries, cellphones and laptops. That’s the plan, anyway.
The thought of trying to portage with all that stuff is rather daunting. 
If you need all that, wouldn’t it be better just to stay at home?
One camp site we stay at on Exmoor has very shallow soil over a packed mixture of rocks and slate fragments - this makes it almost impossible to drive tent pegs in normally, however, as long as the turf is pretty sound, they hold just as well when driven in at a very shallow angle, leaning away from the direction of tension - like this (the yellow thing is the guy rope)
But, but, then how would we enjoy NATURE?
No, seriously. I’ve only once found that level of power absolutely required, and that was when I was exclusively pumping breast milk while camping. Those hand pumps just don’t cut it. Luckily, I was able to use a car adapter and run the breast pump off my car battery - still, it was not easy working the thing sitting in a car seat. I’d rather have done it in the privacy and comfort of my tent.
But, as I’ve said before, I camp kushy. I have room in my car and room in my tent and the back of a 14 year old boy to help fetch and carry, and we don’t camp far off the beaten path - I’m going to bring what I need to be comfortable. I haven’t found a generator necessary for that, but other people have different ideas of comfortable.
But if I had a quiet and small renewable energy source, I’d rather use that than all the batteries for lanterns and flashlights and air mattress pumps that we go through.
Exactly. The rope is the support in this case, all along the edge, rather than using the strength of the tarp’s seam as the support. You can adjust how tight the tarp is by the position of the knots with respect to the tarp corners, but your grommets will never be the load bearing points, so they don’t tear out.
Heh, it is funny how different people have different notions of what “camping” is. Not saying that any are right or wrong, of course.
I always grew up with the expectation that camping was all about getting as far away from the beaten path as humanly possible - which naturally precluded carrying anything too heavy or bulky. That was just what my family did.
I was actually quite mystified by the concept of driving to a prepared campground with lots of other people and camping there, when I first encountered it. It was only when I grew up that I realized that not everyone meant " fly into remote parts of northern Quebec, and then canoe out over a couple of hundred miles" when they said “we went camping”.
More or less what I do. I’m always making tarp shelters. The difficulty I found was angling the shelter so that you can tend a fire while it is somewhat raining, without getting either wet or smoked out (and without burning the tarp).