I don’t know what it is, but when Christmas is over, I’m always so ready for Spring to show up so our camping season can begin. We love to camp as a family. It’s a relatively inexpensive way to get out of town, to lay down all of the stresses from everyday life, to get rid of your electronics for the weekend and focus solely on each other. We have done both tent camping and camper camping and currently have a Rockwood Roo Hybrid camper and LOVE it!
We’ve learned a few camping tips from our previous trips that make setting up camp, enjoying your time there, and taking everything down at the end of the trip more bearable. Here we go:
- Make your own fire starter by using dryer lent. This really does work. All that lent that you clean out of the dryer each time you put a new load in, just place it in a Ziploc bag and keep until you go camping. If you continuously do this, you’ll have quite a little stash. Then, just place pieces of the lent in the fire when you’re at camp and ready to start a fire. Or you can put the lent inside a toilet paper roll and then place on the fire.
- Don’t have a lantern? Don’t want to buy an expensive one? Use a gallon jug of water and place a headlamp pointing inside the full jug of water.
- Pre-make pancake mix and store it in pastry bags.
- Instead of always using ice in your cooler, freeze 4L jugs of water and place in cooler to keep your food cool.
- Use Tic-Tac boxes to store spices.
- Use a white Costco table or folding table outside your camera or tent to keep all your appliances on or things you don’t want inside the camper. When the weather is beautiful, I love to cook outside using this table.
- Have a camping carpet. For those camping in an RV, this is right outside your door. For those in a tent, right outside your zippered entrance. This is good to keep all shoes on as well as sand/dirt out of the RV/tent.
- Use a milk crate to place all shoes in. This way one random shoe isn’t missing and there aren’t shoes laying around your camping carpet or campsite.
Of course there are TONS of other tips you can find out there and even more that we use. But we’ll save the others for another post.
What tips/tricks do you have on camping? I’d love to hear them. Share them in the comments section of this post.
You make a family camping trip sound like a lot of fun! I really like the idea of having a inexpensive way to get out of town, relax, and have some fun. I’ve always thought it would be fun to get a camping trailer for family trips. Hopefully we can make that happen this summer. Thanks for the idea!
This is some really good information about camping. I liked your advice about laying out carpet around your tent or RV. That would be really nice for my nephew who is crawling. Then his knees and hands won’t get hurt.