Camping equipment: The right tent or sleeping bag

Picking the correct  tent takes a few steps.  First your tent has to fit your family.  There are many different sizes and shapes, but you pick it by how many people you plan on putting in it.  Another variable is price.  Tents range from the $30 – $500 and 1 person to 10 person tents.  So make the tent fit your family, but always remember that you usually get what you pay for.

Another very important piece of camping equipment that is a must have is a sleeping bag.  Sleeping bags are selected a couple of different ways.  One is the shape, rectangular or mummy style.  They are just what they sound like, rectangular is you traditional style and mummy is a close fitting colder weather type bag that holds in the heat more.  The other factor is temperature rating.  Sleeping bags are rated to what type of environment you are going to use it in, such as a 40 degree, 30 degree, 10 degree etc.

These two pieces of camping equipment are not the only pieces of camping equipment you need, but the are two of the most important.  Cooking equipment like, Coleman stoves or hiking gear like compasses or backpacks are important pieces of camping equipment also, but you can always manage without them.  You can’t survive without staying warm and dry.

Organization

The secret to keeping everything organized is keeping everything in a central location. The first thing that I did to centralize everything was to go shopping. I bought four of those big plastic containers with the lids. You know, the ones that Wal-Mart always have on sale this time of year. I took them home and started separating all my gear into piles. Sleeping bags here, cooking utensils there, scouting equipment in this pile, propane lantern and tent in that pile. Ok. Everything is separated, so you think. Lets separate it again into piles that will fit into the individual plastic containers you bought. I tried to keep like things together but, some things just didn’t want to cooperate somehow my 4 man tent ended up in the cookware bin. The only thing that did not fit in a bin is my Coleman stove and a fold up picnic table. So just try your best to keep everything together. While you are putting everything into the containers, make a list of what is going in and tape it to the outside of the container so that there is no guess work when it comes time to go on you trip. The best part about this system is when it is time to go you can just grab the containers and buy some food and go. It literally takes 30 minutes to pack for the trip. Good luck and good camping.

Weekend camping trip

This past weekend was awesome. The weather was perfect here in southern Utah, bright sunny day, fishing was good and the temperature was a mild 73 degrees. So we went on a spur of the moment camping trip. We packed up everything in about and hour. We have most everything set aside already. One container has all the sleeping bags in it. The other has all the cooking equipment, lantern and camp shower. We had to bring the 10 person tent because we took some neighbor kids with us. It was great. What made it easy is we didn’t take anything that needed to be cooked. We only took sandwiches and cereal. It was fun anyway, we even had a campfire and sang songs. It was an overnight trip but it was just long enough because my wife and I were the only adults there.