New kit haul, she says. Haul. I bought a couple of new bits of camp kit in June and then I bought a couple more new bits in July. You might say some of this is basic stuff that I should have already had years ago but until the last two years or so, my camping has been very simple. Now I’m a grown-up and starting to want comfort and convenience.
First, and least excitingly: I bought a water carrier! This is one of those basics I was talking about. I’ve wanted one for years because I’ve had a terrible habit of walking across the entire campsite with my mug every time I want a drink or my pot every time I want to do some cooking and I needed a water carrier but it turns out that’s easier said than done. I just wanted a 5-10 litre bottle and they were all collapsible (my Rangers have these, I don’t like them, they don’t pour nicely) or rollable (I just don’t want to transport that much water or at that price) or they were far too big or, just when I’d found exactly the right one, they were ludicrously expensive. Seriously, I found the perfect 10 litre water carrier at my local caravanning shop, went to grab it, noticed the £45 price label and put it straight back. I’ve always said that caravanning is a ludicrously expensive way of not going very far. Eventually, after raiding every outdoors shop, every motoring shop and the occasional garden centre that I came across for a year, I resorted to Amazon where I got a nice little 10l canister with a pouring spout for under £10. Review? Well, it carried enough water for my weekend. It didn’t leak. Did what it said on the tin.
Second, a coolbox. I don’t want to take a lot of chilled food with me camping for an assortment of reasons but it would be handy to be able to stop my butter and cheese turning into oil within four hours, so I bought a teeny-tiny 4l coolbox. I already have the ice packs to put in it – oh yes, I have those in my cupboard even though I never had any proper means to use them! By the time I’ve driven all the way to Dartmoor, those packs are already cooling and it would be nice if there was somewhere on site to refreeze them, or a camper’s fridge. But this is a review of my coolbox, not of camping facilities! It’s adequate for 12 hours, I think. Probably more in winter. Despite the heat, my butter and cheese survived the weekend but by the end, I was a lot happier to eat them after they’d been back in a real fridge to cool down and firm up. Better than nothing but nowhere near as good as a fridge.
And third, I have a cupboard! I got a Go Outdoors catalogue through the post and there was a deal on cupboards. I shouldn’t. I really shouldn’t. It takes up a lot of space in my two-man tent. It was useful. I kept my food in it, my kitchen bag and my plate bag and every time I came in, I dumped my stuff on top of it. It’s a great place to keep keys and cameras and masks and little bits that you don’t want to misplace. But it does take up a lot of space and it really is an unnecessary luxury. Buy one but only if you’ve got a bigger tent. In my new four-man, it was magnificent.
Then my second haul. And the big thing is the aforementioned bigger tent.
Look, I’ve spent a substantial chunk of 2021 repairing my tent. I like it, it’s a nice size. Plenty big enough for one person but not annoyingly big. Easy to pitch, big enough to stretch in, small enough to keep warm. But I’ve just had a birthday and I can feel myself teetering at the top of the slippery slope towards caravanning. As if I’ll ever be able to afford a caravan, or indeed a car powerful enough to tow one. I have nowhere to store a caravan so storage would be another cost and once you start buying stuff for a caravan, it never ends. I suppose the more practical step is campervan, or convert your own van. But I’m now reaching the point where sometimes I’d like a tent I can stand up in. Where I can put my cupboard without it being too much in the way. Where my feet don’t touch the fabric at the other end of the tent when I lie down.
And so I invested in a four man tent. Well, I told my mum I was tempted by it and so it became my birthday present. It’s a Eurohike Sendero 4 and it doesn’t have great reviews. It’s a weekend/festival tent that’s designed for fair weather. It doesn’t stand up to much wind but reviews seem to suggest it’s pretty good at keeping the rain out. People don’t like the door, mostly. It zips down the sides but not across the bottom. That’s fine with me. I could indeed glue on some velcro, like one reviewer did but I haven’t yet. I did race down to the local agricultural store for twenty metres of blue rope to make storm guys within five minutes of pitching it and once it had that bit of extra structure, it stood up quite happily to Dartmoor gusts.
Washing-up has been on my mind lately. Some sites provide a rusty sink with a trickle of cold water. Some provide nothing but the drinking water tap in the middle of the field. A couple of weeks ago I went to Guides to help with gadget-making and although I intended to teach them to make draining boards, instead they invented their own as per the Skills Builder cards – except they didn’t have the basic background knowledge that would have made that card make sense. And I’m still considering making my own draining board. Six long poles and a huge bundle of short bamboo canes, a long bit of twine and half an hour sitting quietly on the floor and you’ve got a draining board. Or you can buy a ready-made camp kitchen. So umm… now I have a camp kitchen. It’s just a concertina-folding table, really. It has a windshield around the top for cooking (well, I couldn’t figure out how to make it stay standing up so it’s stored neatly underneath) and it has two mesh shelves underneath for storage – or for leaving your wet stuff to dry. It’s a complete washing-up stand! I daresay I’ll cook on it occasionally, if I take it outside, but it’ll be handy for all the other stuff.
Finally, and only slightly more excitingly than the water carrier, a kettle. I have never owned a camp kettle. Never needed one. The only hot drink I drink is hot chocolate and I like that made with milk. But as campsites so rarely have hot water for washing up, it seemed a good idea to be able to generate my own hot water. On Guide camp, we have an urn two feet tall plugged into a gas bottle even taller. For me, that’s a bit excessive, says the owner of a four-man tent she intends to sleep in alone. So I bought a one-litre stovetop kettle.
And as my new tent is so much bigger than my old, there’s plenty of room for my cupboard and my kitchen in the porch and I can haul them both outside when the weather’s nice if I can be bothered. The cupboard is heavy when full and the kitchen unit is far too wobbly to move with stuff on top of it. Now I’m tempted by some kind of kitchen shelter. My neighbours had their kitchen under a Eurohike tarp that I kept looking covetously at. You see, this is the trouble. Once you start upgrading your stuff, it’s a slippery slope to that caravan. My torch lamp isn’t powerful enough for such a big tent. Is there something I could use as a wardrobe for organising my clothes and bits and pieces? What about a double burner stove with built-in grill? An actual bed? It just never ends.
I usually only camp for a weekend because I don’t sleep well in tents and it gets tiring but with an actual kitchen and enough room to stand up, I’m starting to think it might be time to do longer camps. It’s still not looking like I’ll be going abroad in the foreseeable future and camping is both a cheaper and pleasanter and potentially more socially-distanced and COVID-safe way of exploring the UK. So I think you’ll be seeing more camping in the future, with my new camp setup.
And one more bonus item: I bought a new travel towel. I meant to take my existing travel towels but they were on the washing line after swimming the night before and I never gave it a thought until I was an hour from home that damn, I should have washed them last night as soon as I got home and brought one with me! So while I was buying the kettle, I dropped a towel into my basket. My existing ones are smooth flat microfibre and this one is a kind of soft loopy terry – much softer, much more absorbent and so light and fluffy and enormous that it was like I’d found the answer to all my towel woes. I’m going to try not to take it swimming. Don’t ruin it with chlorine. This is for camping and holidaying.
Oh, by the way, you may have noticed some of my stuff is marked with black and purple electrical tape. That’s a hangover from my student caving days, when tape was the only way to mark your equipment. The boys had already used every combination of the red, blue, black, green and earth tapes that you could get in B&Q. Ordering coloured tape online was an innovation back then and so now black and purple are my colours and I still like to have my stuff marked – not least to separate it from Guide and Ranger stuff when I go on camp with them.
And that genuinely is now all the new camping kit I’ve bought lately. Well, unless you count the emergency guy ropes I had to grab – it’s just thinnish blue rope from an agricultural store. I popped into Go Outdoors in Exeter for the kettle and towel and while I was queuing for the till, I watched a couple with a trolley full of tent, airbeds, sleeping bags, everything they needed for their first ever camping holiday, right down to the matching blue plastic plates and mugs. I hope they had fun but they did look funny with that trolleyful and I also hope they tried to put the tent up at home before taking it to the campsite – almost certainly didn’t though. (Well, I didn’t but then I’ve camped enough to have literally written the guide to how to pitch a tent).