It’s all relative. We do the tent thing. Some friends have a little cabin on 100 acres up in woods about 60 miles west of here. They spend a week or two there from time to time and call it “going to camp.” But that’s not camping. Sitting in the RV watching satellite TV with the generator blaring away outside is not camping, I don’t care where you are.
It’s mostly about “why” you are doing it, not “how” you are doing it.
I’ll need some more info if I’m expected to join you. Sounds fabulous!
Then you should pick tenting. From the OP:
Camping is where you go out into nature, and there are no other people around you to see or hear.
Camping is where there are no water faucets, no showers, no store, no video games, no electric, and no cement pad to park or put your tent on. There are no rules, no noise limitations, no curfews, no concrete or plastic swimming pools, no toilets, no firewood for sale, and no miniature golf. It does not matter if you drive there or walk in, or ride horses in, as long as nobody else anywhere near.
( the people who go to campgrounds, state parks, national campgrounds, Disneyworld, etc. are not camping )
Rhymers don’t read OPs carefully. There is a sacred story that explains why.
Yeah, I would agree that it is camping, but it would still be camping if he had taken somebody with him.
I dont know what you mean by** “hard core”** . He is camping all right, but nothing out of the ordinary other than nobody is camping with him and he is doing it for a long period of time, a whole year.
I wouldn’t actually put any of those requirements on it. I’ve been on several campouts as a Boy Scout where we stayed in a cabin, and nobody had any qualms about calling those campouts (though one of them we called “Sissy Camp”). The cabins in question had electricity, a full kitchen, and running water, though no hot water or showers and the bedding was military-style bunk cots.
By contrast, I’ve also been on campouts without even the tent, sleeping either in shelters made on the spot from naturally-available materials, or out under the stars.
On the other hand, I would not count those “glamping” sites as camping, despite the accommodations being technically tents. To me, I think the defining feature of “camping” is that you’re deliberately giving up some degree of luxury for the sake of getting closer to nature. Oh, and it has to be at least overnight, but not as a continual lifestyle. If your “campsite” is just a big parking lot, it doesn’t count because you’re not getting closer to nature, and if your “tent” has room service, it doesn’t count because you’re not giving up luxury.
Three of these tents: 2 6s and an 8.
Three Coleman propane stoves and a Peak One for coffee.
A few of these, a few of these, 6 large ice chests, two cook sets and years of experience. We do a full Thanksgiving dinner: turkey (pit-roasted last year), stuffing, plenty of sides, wines for each course, cognac for afters, and several pies for dessert. And that’s just Thanksgiving. We do steaks the night before. Not a bad evolution from 26 years ago, when it was just four guys throwing down sleeping bags in the desert for a weekend away, eating canned food and swilling beer. Our wives have made us…civilized. :smack:
“Camping” covers a lot of ground (no pun intended). When I take my kids, we usually have a trailer full of stuff, including an eight-man tent, two of my shelters, electric hotplates, a gas stove with a barbecue-sized propane tank, coffee-maker, etc., etc.
I also have a set of backpacking gear for treks into the interior of Algonquin Park. I used to teach survival, and I’ve lived off the land with minimal gear on a number of occasions, although it’s not what I’d call fun these days.
I spent my whole childhood camping. We used a tent trailer that we towed behind the car. It folded out and slept five. We used the old Coleman stove and kerosene lanterns. Only once when I was 16 I went on my last camping trip with my Dad and it was the whole sleeping bag on the ground deal. Woke up at 3am with a boulder firmly wedged in my hip, ran out of money in the shower and stepped on a lit cigarette in my bare feet. Didn’t go back for 20 years!
We had a neighbour who went camping the whole summer every year. I remember when you could first get electricity at camp sites, the wife brought her vacuum cleaner! Over the years we could measure their affluence by the size of the trailer parked in the driveway. They started out with the little trailer like ours and by the time I was a teenager, they had graduated to what looked like a rock band’s tour bus.
Now that we live overseas in a tiny house with no storage we’ve only been to Eurocamp. Not quite glamping but you’re on a cot, not on the ground and there is a mini kitchen of sorts. I thought it was a great compromise to owning all the kit but my daughter has decided that this summer we have to keep it real and sleep in a proper tent on the ground, in the middle of nowhere. It’s not going to be as easy at 50 as it was at 20.
I’m somewhere between the top two. It’s not camping if you have a full kitchen and air conditioning, but a shower doesn’t rule out the term IMHO. I often rent a rustic cabin - woodfired stove, dry sinks and water pump outside near the front door. I do consider that camping even though it has walls. I guess electricity is a big differentiator, although propane can go pretty far these days.
For a woman alone, it’s as far as I’m willing to go. A soft tent is just not safe enough.
It’s not camping if you have any form of solid structure around you. The most permanent structure that can be used, and still be called camping, is a 3-sided adirondack shed. That’s kind of luxurious though.
It isn’t camping if you used a car to get the entire way there, ie, you drove up and unloaded. If you carried your things any over a dirt path, or used a horse/dog sled/pack llama as a means of transport because cars cannot pass or are not allowed to, then you’re camping.
I generally don’t think its camping if any emergency vehicle other than a helicopter could reach you .
Guess I’m a purist.
Summer camp, by the way, is not camping. My summer camp had the “pavillion” canvas tents with wooden platforms, and showers in an adjacent building – that’s not camping any more than a visit to the zoo is a safari.
Dressing up in a ruffled shirt and a pink suit and putting on an outrageous accent.
He had visitors that stayed a couple of nights. He lived out there from the age of 55 until his mid-80’s. He went into civilization on occasion but for the most part lived there for the rest of his life. Supplies got flown in a couple of times a year.
If the GMs have to discipline you, or you start getting PK’ed by annoyed high levelers who see what you’re doing.
Greetings from a fellow purist. I agree 100% with you, and would add only that a given outing has to be for at least two nights to really qualify as camping. My wife and I spent most of our vacation time in the 70’s backpacking, including several 50-60 mile, high elevation treks in the Sierras. After our knees got a little too old for that, we switched to multiday canoe camping on huge lakes.
After some more ageing, we settled for four-wheeling to the most remote, hard-to-reach places possible, sleeping in a tent when weather was bad. Even at the time, we felt that we were now “camping” (with sarcastic quotation marks).
Next phase was upgrading to a full-size 4x4 pickup with pop-up camper shell, but our mission priority was still to get as far away from anybody and everybody as possible.
Fifteen years later, now in our 60’s, we finally bit the bitter bullet last year and replaced the camper with a 19 foot self-contained (plumbing, etc) travel trailer. We still call it camping, but only for lack of a more accurate term.
Amen. Very well put.
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I voted “other”. To me, camping is a state of mind, and isn’t defined by vehicle or type of shelter one uses. I’ve car camped, backpacked, slept on the beach and spent time in an RV–they were all “camping trips” in my book.
At a minimum it should involve a tent.
Car camping still feels like a bit of a cheat to me. It’s not REALLY camping unless you hike off into the wilderness. However, given the difficulties of backpacking with children, I’m willing to give car camping a pass for families.
I went with the unpopular “Tent trailers (popups). It ain’t camping if there isn’t a tent” option. Mostly because I have a popup tent trailer (although I will point out, it is a hard-sided popup tent trailer. Yeah, really.).
And I do feel like I’m “cheating” when I use it to camp. But here’s why I still call it camping: there’s no real toilet or shower, and I have to work to put it up. The sink depends on a water hookup (never available where I camp) or a 20 gallon reservoir (so I still have to haul my water!). The stove is a camp stove, which is just a hair larger than the camp stove I take when canoeing. In short, it’s quite a bit more comfortable than tent camping, but not nearly as comfortable as RV’ing.
RV’ing is a different activity altogether. Sure, some people RV in the same parks that I camp, but having a hard-sided (not popup) trailer and larger entails having a completely self-contained environment. When you’re completely self-contained, that’s no longer camping, but rather RV’ing.