Just some ideas to make your camping trip easier. Don’t forget the Big Uborka Giveaway! A copy of The Camper Van Cookbook for the best tip left in comments by 14th August.
- Store food that doesn’t have to be kept cold in disposable or collapsible containers, as you will have less of it by the end of the week. A banana box is good.
- Two-litre water bottles are easier to fill and to pour than large water containers. You will have to go to the tap more often, but that’s often quite a sociable activity, or something you can send the children to do.
- Take two ice packs for your coolbag: one in the bag, one in the campsite freezer. Swap daily. Keep your coolbag in the shade, and not in the tent.
- Shower in the middle of the afternoon when there are no queues and plenty of hot water.
- Keep a folded tea towel in the bottom of the coolbag, which otherwise collects a pond of smelly water as your ice pack defrosts.
- Make tent etiquette rules very clear to children: keep fly screens zipped up (especially for the bedrooms); no shoes inside the tent, or have a ‘wet’ area and a ‘dry’ area, particularly if you’re suffering from copious rain. We use an old bathmat by the tent door.
- Have two mallets, then both adults can peg out the tent together. This helps to keep your base square.
- Rely on a nice middle-class guidebook or website like Cool Camping. We have Cool Camping for Kids and it has been mostly reliable. Family campsites often provide ample playmates for the children.
- Handy, but not essential kit, includes self-inflating mattresses, which are reasonably comfortable; microfleece towels which take up less space than traditional towels; inflatable pillows, but take pillowcases because they smell a bit plasticky, or stuff clothes into your sleeping bag cover; aluminium tent pegs rock – Pete loves them; flipflops are good so you can hop in and out of the tent without putting shoes on each time, also nice if the shower floor is a bit skeffy; duct tape; clothes pegs; fairy lights.
And here’s how to arrange your bin bag – peg between two guy ropes so it’s open; peg closed at night. The black bag was supplied by the campsite; normally I’d use something a lot smaller, like a supermarket plastic bag.
Fantastic tips, thank you.
My only tip is this: if you use a balloon bed on a mountain marathon, make sure you stretch the balloons and test blowing them up before the event. After 8+ hours of running over mountains, even a simple task like blowing up a balloon is hard. Further more, blow them up into the bed itself to save trying to stuff them in afterwards. And remember to take spares!
Okay, so a little limited in terms of audience applicability but hey, it’s still a tip!
Wowee, that’s tiny! Is it actually comfortable?
Not really but comfort is usually way down the list of requirements in these events. But it does mean that running is more comfortable because less weight. Also, they do tend to burst during the night.