It’s January and I Just Want to Camp

January 2006 – a frozen creek in California

January 2006 – a frozen creek in California

The holidays are over, along with most of my vacation hours, and it seems like it’s going to be a long time until President’s Day. These are some long monotonous weeks, where it seems like the only thing to do that is outdoor-related, is maintenance on the gear.

win-olympus-stylus-1050sw

One thing that happened this week, though, was that I received the Olympus Stylus 1050 SW that I’m giving away next month. It kind of makes my own Cannon PowerShot A720IS look a bit dated! Anyway, I’m looking forward to rewarding the next lucky CampingBlogger fan in just five weeks, on February 27th. Our last winner, of the Garmin GPS, was a fellow blogger – Justin at Southern Hiker (no, there’s no nepotism here – selection of the winner is at the complete mercy of www.random.org).

Back to camping – it is easy to slip into complacency in January, particularly for those who live in the colder climates across the country. I hadn’t noticed this myself, until last week when I was putting one of the kids to bed and they asked me when we were going camping again. I guess It’s good to have kids around to keep us focused on what’s important!

Two years ago we had several weeks of sub-freezing weather, here in Northern California and we were camping in a trailer that we owned at the time. Now, RV camping in the winter is a pretty sweet deal, because the heater keeps the interior toasty-warm…unless you forget to fill the propane tanks. In true Murphy’s Law fashion, our heater started blowing cold air at around 2:00 o’clock in the morning – not a good thing when you have three toddlers with you!

It’s a lot easier remembering to be prepared when you are winter-camping in a tent, than it is if you are camping in the luxury of an RV. Part of the attraction of camping in the winter, though, is taking on Mother Nature and proving to yourself that you can deal with a little adversity. Sure, we may have camping stoves and the latest in cold weather clothing, but camping in the winter still connects us with our past, when it was just called “living.”

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3 thoughts on “It’s January and I Just Want to Camp”

  1. Okay, we live in sunny Las Vegas, NV and in the winter it can become rather cool and when camping by tent we always take our Mr. Heater by bigbuddy.com. It’s a two burner propane heater and each burner puts out 9,000 BTU per hour, that’s 18,000 BTU total. The heater is designed to heat a 400 square foot area and our Eureka Copper Canyon Cabin 3 season tent is a 10×10 foot area, so we are always plenty warm. Especially at night during quiet hours when I have to get up, get dressed and go ask some RVer to either turn off his generator or put the generator in is RV with him so we can sleep. Camp hosts, haven’t met to many that back up the rules. Some do, most don’t. BLM land that’s for me!