Not me. At least, not yet. My husband will be taking me on a day hike at the end of next week, then we’re going to spend the night in the woods (!) in a tent (!). He assures me that spiders cannot get in. So, I’m looking forward to the experience (I think) and I’d like to hear about yours. Got any stories or anything you’d like to say about leaving civilization behind?
I love camping! There is nothing in this world that compares to food cooked over a campfire, especially breakfast. Mmmmm. I’m jealous.
Enjoy it and don’t worry about the spiders.
You’re camping inside a hermetically sealed flask?
Seriously. The spiders get into your house, right? No tent in the world can keep the spiders out.
Personally, I’d rather eat worms in pus sauce whilst being punched repeatedly in the nose and sodomized with a red-hot poker than go camping, but some people seem to like it.
I took a 3-week camping trip, but we stayed in KOA campgrounds, which is the only way to rough it, if you ask me. They have laundry services, food, nice showers, real toilets, etc. I’m not much for the real out-in-the-woods kind of camping, though I’ve done it (one night, got my period, checked into a hotel in the morning). I’m just not that kind of gal. After all, if we weren’t meant to use electricity, god wouldn’t have invented curling irons.
I love it! I was a boy scout growing up, a ranger (i.e. wilderness guide / instructor) for the boy scouts in college, and I still hike, camp, and backpack. (Tho, not as often as I would like to - stupid work…)
I have noticed a couple of things about my experiences recently. I’ve turned into a foodie since high school. That is, I used to be able to eat damn near anything, including some camp food that, I am sure, would make a goat turn tail and run from. Now, I find that good camp food is a necessity for me. All that that really means for me is that I have to take a little more care when packing. Also, I’m not entirely sure how this happened, but apearently there has been some sort of flux in our gravity field. Since I was a teen, it turns out that climbing mountains takes way more energy to overcome that higher gravity thing… 
OTOH, I notice things more when I’m hiking now (as opposed to when I was a teen). I’m actually old enough now to stop and smell the… well, there’s never any roses, but I guess the trees, wildflowers, etc. I can almost feel myself “detoxing” when I hike.
Once you zip up, it is really hard for any bug to get into the tent. Spiders and whatnot can get in if you leave the flaps unzipped.
Good luck, don’t worry about the spiders, and enjoy!
Some of this may be overkill for a short hike and one night of camping. But here’s my advice none-the-less:
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Does it rain much where you’ll be camping? If so, assume it will rain the entire time, and prepare accordingly.
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Water, water, water. Make sure you have water covered. If you can’t bring along much water, you must bring a good water filter (e.g. a Katadyn filter). In addition, you should always have a bottle of water disinfection tablets on hand. The very best is something called Polar Pure.
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Bring along bug repellant (100% Deet), and a mosquito head net for each person.
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Hat and sunscreen.
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Are there any laws that forbid you from carrying a handgun? If not, I would definitely do so. A 9 mm or larger with at least two full magazines will suffice. (I never go anywhere unarmed.)
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Other things you may want to being include a knife, compass, map, GPS, cell phone, signaling mirror, small air horn, baby wipes, and matches. Everything should be stored in Zip-Lock bags.
If that’s what it takes. 
I’m a huge fan of hiking and camping - except for all the walking, carrying stuff, cooking over a fire, shitting in a hole, the bugs, sleeping on the ground and in a tent - and basically, hiking and camping!
Seriously, I love hiking and the outdoors, but I loves having a porcelin crapper, a shower, and a comfy bed. Inns and lodges in and near state and nat’l parks do it for me.
I store Zip-Lock bags in Zip-Lock bags. You never know when you’ll need to store something in a clean and waterproof container. There’s nothing worse than opening a pack of Oreos* and realizing the rest are going to be soggy by morning. Zip-Locks rock. (The big gallon sized ones are great for putting dirty diapers in so they don’t smell up your garbage bag, but I don’t think you need to deal with that!)
Dung Beetle, are you hiking in to your campspot, or can you get a car within 1/4 mile or so? If the later, you can bring a lot more stuff to ensure your comfort. For example, I *highly *recommend sheets and blankets on an air mattress as opposed to a sleeping bag on the tent floor (or even a sleeping bag on an air mattress.) They just feel cleaner and snugglier. (Plus, I don’t care what they say, zipping two sleeping bags together is NOT easy or fun.) But obviously if you have to carry everything on your back for 10 miles, you won’t be lugging stuff like that.
Since it’s your first time, I’m guessing your SO will be worrying about tents and gear and that sort of stuff. You should remember to bring layers of clothes. Leggings can be worn under jeans, or alone or under pajamas, depending on the temperature. Turtlenecks can likewise go under T-shirts, so you have options as the weather changes. I would suggest splurging on a few pairs of expensive, well-made “hiking socks”. They are so wonderful - thicker and more form fitting than regular socks. Pack at least two more pairs than the number of days you’ll be out, in case of wet weather. When it’s raining, if your feet are dry and warm, the rest of you can be soaked and you’ll still be pretty comfortable. OTOH, if your feet are wet and cold, it doesn’t matter how dry the rest of you is, you’ll feel awful.
If you’re buying new hiking shoes/boots, make sure you wear them for at least 3 or 4 days before your hike, for most of the day. While it’s true that the don’t need “breaking in”, your feet may need a few days to adjust to them. They’re built really differently from street shoes, and rub new places and bend in different areas. You do NOT want to wear new shoes, however good they feel when you first put them on, when you’re 100 miles from a DSW Shoe Warehouse!
*Why, yes, this does tell you all you need to know about the level of camping I do!
Hubby and I like camping, but on the not-so-rough side. We go twice a year with his family, but we go to state parks. His parents and such have campers with electricity and water, so we’re hardly roughing it. (But when you’ve got two 80-year-olds with you, you don’t want to go too rough.) Now that we have a baby, we get to sleep in the pop-up camper. Without that stipulation, we wouldn’t have gone over Memorial Day weekend - it was just too hot.
We also like to go tent camping once a summer with our friends, but that may be cancelled this year due to the presence of a pair of infants. We always sleep in tents and don’t have electricity or water. (There are water pumps, but we only use them for washing dishes - we bring drinking water.) For cooking, we have a pretty nice set-up. We’ve got a gas stove and propane grill and a really neat “camping kitchen” to set it up on. It’s basically a folding counter top with shelves and hooks and things. We prep in the middle and cook on either end. It’s quite convenient (other than being heavy and bulky even when folded and in the carrying case) and leaves the picnic tables for eating. If we want to shower, we drive over to the shower building provided for the electric sites. And we have inflatable mattresses. I sleep on my side, so sleeping on the ground is out of the question, unless I want to be seriously ouch in the morning.
I’ve never been backpacking (haul it in, haul it out), and I don’t think I want to. There’s just too much stuff I like to have.
Nice list. Add to that one of those miner’s headlamps, and you’re good to go. Oh, one change, I prefer a plastic Bic lighter to matches, no need to keep it dry.
First of all, when I was 15 I did “Outward Bound”. Two weeks hiking and camping and cooking and pooping in the woods. That’s the most extreme hiking trip I’ve ever been on.
When I was in college and grad school, I still, somewhat regularly, would hike into the woods, set up a tent whenever I felt like stopping, and would sleep out over night, or two nights.
Since being married, we’ve done that a little, but it’s mostly been “car camping”. That is, you pull your car up to a campsite and set up the tent. You can still cook over a fire, and its nice sleeping outdoors. That’s barely camping, in my book, but still fun.
In a couple weeks, we’re going to Idaho and Utah. We’re climbing a mountain in Idaho, and in Utah we’re hiking into a canyon and sleeping in the canyon. We have a guide for that, and a pack-goat. It’s a couple hunny each, but that includes food, and it sounds like a lot of fun.
So, yeah, I like camping. And I think bringing a gun along anywhere in America sounds ridiculous. And, yes, I’ve camped where there are bears and, possibly, mountain lions, and crazy people.
I’m certainly no stranger to camping as I have always resided in either Kentucky or West Virginia where forests and hiking trails are plentiful, but I’m a greenhorn camper compared to some of my friends.
The most remote location I’ve camped-in is far away from home and in The Everglades at Cape Sable(?) (I think that was the name). All of us in the group had to canoe for approx 6 miles to reach the camp site. We stayed there for 5 days/4nights beginning 29 Dec 1999. For me, it was quite fitting that I was completely out of touch with the outdide world and civilization during the whole New Year’s 2000 and the associated Y2K hype and madness. As much as I enjoyed it, a shower never felt so good upon my return to modern facilities.
The most recent camping experience for me was at a music festical 3 weeks ago, but there were vendors and port-a-potties and live music nearby so it wasn’t an excape from civilization but certainly fun.
Also worth mentioning is that one of the funniest I have ever said leaped off my vocal chords while on a camping excursion. One of my friends camping with me was a history and philosophy major in college who somewhat frequently liked to steer any ordinary or casual conversation into a philosophical one. No complaints from me…I enjoy many of those convos…but once in a while I’d give sarcastic responses when I deemed a responses had value comedically or anedotally. However, in this instance it was a bit of a role reversal as it was he who started the ordinairy palaver while I did the steering…
I wake up, get out of my tent, and begin picking ‘Blackbird’ (Beatles’ song) on my acoustic guitar. Likewise, my philosophical comrade saunters out of his tent nearby while still sorta dazed and the following dialogue commenced:
Him <talking to himself>: “Damn, that tent gets hot in the morning under the sun”…<pauses>…“where is my lighter?” He spends a couple minutes looking around and says, “ArchitectChore, I feel like I’m looking for something but I’m not sure what it is.”
Me: “Are you speaking of an item here at the campsite or are you just saying that as a metaphor for your life as a whole?” I said it quickly and sarcastically just to sorta poke fun at him at the way he attempts to steer conversations.
Him: <shakes his head> “Oh…that is sooo deep…I’m not sure what to say.” <thinks about it> “I’ll have to say yes to both.”
Eh…maybe you had to be there and know him to appreciate how funny that was on several different levels. The statement was sarcastic, ironic, witty, and satirical yet powerful in the truth that it seemingly revealed. He thought I was being serious at first but later that day I explained that I heard him say that he was looking for the lighter when he first got out of the tent and that I knew he was still looking for it; I made the statement just to light heartedly mock him in the way he likes steer conversations. After that, he couldn’t stop laughing.
…if you keep the tent zipped up. Though, you are more likely to get mosquitos in your tent if you fail to do so.
You mean the first time I ever saw a scorpion it was crawling up my leg type stories?
The trick to camping is to not make yourself miserable. If you’re car-camping there’s no point in using a teeny pup-tent and a thin sleeping pad, for instance. Make yourself comfortable with a cot or air mattress and a tent you can at least sit up in. Bone up on 1 or 2 pot recipes and enjoy the heck out of your meals. Remember you’re going to need some entertainment when it gets dark, unless you’re utterly pooped and just want to sack out. It happens.
Ditto on the food thing. You get REALLY hungry from all that fresh air. And don’t buy too much fresh food. You’ll end up throwing half of it away. You can probably hit the army surplus store and grab some MREs and then you and the husbandal unit can play army man!
For car-camping, I like to make a one-pot meal ahead of time and freeze it at home (in a big Zip-Lock bag, of course.) Stir-fry, casserole, pot roast and veggies, that kind of thing. Frozen, it takes the place of (some of the) ice in the cooler, and it’s generally thawed by dinner time. Then I just pop it into a pot and heat it over the fire or a Coleman stove. It’s so nice to have real, flavorful home-cooked food when you’re tired from setting up camp, or it’s so hot that you don’t want to spend even half an hour over a stove.
And, of course, you must bring stuff for S’mores. I think it’s a law or something. (S’mores tip #312: set the chocolate squares on a flat rock next to the fire while you toast your marshmallow. They will soften from the heat, and be even gooier when sandwiched.)
My other favorite camping snack: honey roasted peanuts. The protein’s useful, of course, but what I like is that they’re both salty and sweet, so no matter which one you’re craving, you’ve got it covered!
I like camping; it’s a good, cheap holiday, but in the UK, it invariably consists of driving to a camp site and pitching there; not exactly back to nature, more like staying in a very basic, cheap self-catering resort/hotel, with rooms that happen to be made of fabric. On the plus side, the hot showers are usually very good. I’m all for the wilderness experience and have done it in the past, but there really isn’t much in the way of suitably remote countryside here; in southern Britain, it’s nearly impossible to be more than a couple of miles away from a road.
But as I say, for us, camping is just a cheap holiday; ~£12 per night leaves more money to spend on visiting local attractions etc.
If you have a tent with a sewn-in groundsheet (or a larger tent that has inner bedrooms like that) and you keep it zipped up all the time, then creepy crawlies aren’t a big problem at all.
We just returned from a week’s camping holiday at a site in North Yorkshire, which was very nice; we managed to forage just a little for wild food (cherries the first day; plums the next and bilberries later in the week); I love the challenge of cooking a family meal on the camping stove (2 gas rings and a pathetic grill); sometimes the seemingly more complicated things are easier to prepare - for example, it’s easier to fry up some meat, throw in some chopped vegetables and stock, then make up some dough and add dumplings, leaving it all to simmer for an hour or so, than it is to stand over the stove stirring beans and turning sausages and eggs to stop them all from burning, yet everyone else seems to plump for the all-day breakfast, often acting quite surprised to see us tucking into stew and dumplings or a hearty casserole.
I’ve even baked a passable cake by preheating a cast iron pan, adding the cake mixture, covering in foil, then insulating it with towels and sleeping bags.
Dude, seriously… Where the hell are you hiking? Harlem? With a sign that says “I hate niggers” ??
Don’t get me wrong - I own a handgun, and used to entertain notions of bringinig it with me when I was hiking. But then I realized that
a.) the four-legged critters where I hike are not really that dangerous (you get a pass if you’re hiking in grizzly territory),
b.) the two-legged critters that are likely to be dangerous are also likely to not be camping where I am,
c.) hiking / backpacking (in terms of violent crime) is safer than walking down main street USA (small town), and
d.) there are rather a lot of laws to prevent people from bringing handguns into state and national parks.
I leave civilization to leave civilization.
I’m not opposed to the ownership or responsible use of firearms–I’m the kid who could field strip and reassemble a Browning Hi-Power or 1911 blindfold at age 9–but whatintheheck what do you plan to do with a 9mm handgun in backcountry? Predatory attacks in backcountry (by man or beast) are rare, and unless you’re going to carry the arm strapped to your thigh in a tactical holster–trust me, this’ll definitely freak out other hikers, even more than the camp/utility knife I carry strapped to my pack–it’s not really going to be available for ready deployment in an (unlikely) emergency situation. A 9mm isn’t really sufficient to deal with genuine threats (moose, brown bear, mountain lion), and in any case a predatory attack is likely to come with much if any warning, so again, if the pistol isn’t immediately at hand it does nothing but add another 2-3 lbs to your loadout. I can think of far more fruitful uses for that weight budget, like extra water, rain gear, spare rations, a book on edible vegetation, a fishing rod and tackle, et cetera. I’ve hiked something on the order of 2000 miles, a good portion alone in deep wilderness and bear country, and have never had or felt the need for a firearm.
Also, note in the US that carrying a handgun is (generally) forbidden in National Parks and Recreation Areas, and carrying firearms is often restricted or requires permit in National Forests, state forests, et cetera. So if you elect to carry an arm, check with the relevent land management service to determine the legality of doing so.
The horror! The horror!
Stranger