camping

I am not a very outdoorsy person, and I envy those who come by it naturally. They all seem tan, and fit, and oddly calm. I suppose it’s because they’ve found nature, or whatever. It wasn’t until I met my husband that I went camping for the first time. And while I love it, that love comes with a healthy dose of nerves.

If you’re more of an indoor cat, here’s how to make your first camping trip bearable:

Know your location. Read about your campground and nearby activities. And let’s be real – your activity will likely be hiking. Read about the hiking, and bring appropriate footwear. No one should get stuck on a ledge in Skechers if they can avoid it.

As for the campground, chances are good you’ll be in a state or national park. The campground’s website will list basics included at each campsite as well as campground amenities. Look for a campsite that has space for your car, because car camping is the easiest way to break into this whole living outdoors business.

If any of the following words describe your campsite, you’ve booked a more advanced site: primitive, dispersed, walk-in, backcountry. These sites require hiking off the path and into the woods to find them, or they may be solo sites or ones with only a few other spots nearby. They are not car friendly, and they are generally quite isolated. Have fun with that.

Accept the grease. Maybe I’m just lazy, but I don’t care about skipping the shower for a few nights when out in the woods. All it means is that I can go right to comfy clothes in the evening, and after the first 24 hours, my hair is crazy enough that it stays up nicely while hiking. If you’re a diva, you have two options: either book a campground with showers, or suck it up, buttercup.

Also, the worrier in me suggests you use unscented dry shampoo and baby wipes, or skip them entirely. You don’t want to smell like dinner while sleeping in the woods, right? Right.

Mitigate the gross. I mean, it’s camping. Outside stuff is going to get in your space, because you are in their space. Follow my basic, slightly paranoid rules:

First, clear your tent area as much as possible. Your goal is to set up on a dirt surface, no leaves or branches. And keep your tent door zipped – who cares if it’s hot in there? Everything gets colder in the woods at night, so you’ll be fine in a few hours.

Second, I have no shame in admitting that ticks are my 2017 Camping Paranoia topic of choice. Minimize your chances of getting bit by wearing light colored clothing and keeping your hair braided or in a bun so no loose ends are swinging around. At night, keep your hair up, stick a headband on your head and over your ears, and if you want to go all out, put on a lightweight hoodie and pull it up over your head. 2017 Camping Paranoia topic of choice, people.

Third, use common sense. Spray yourself and your tent with mosquito repellent, and set up citronella candles on the picnic table. Choose clothing that is comfortable, but not super loose, and wear socks at night to avoid mosquito bites on your ankles. And keep all footwear inside your tent to avoid insects, and morning dew. Wet shoes while in the woods just sucks, man.

Know the woods are noisy. Nighttime in the woods is loud. Loud. Leaves fall and twigs snap and nocturnal creatures prance around. All of it can sound like a horror movie when you don’t know what’s outside your tent. Once a leaf fell onto my tent and I almost jumped directly into the car via the moon roof. If you find yourself unable to sleep, stick in your earbuds and turn on a playlist. Sometimes it’s helpful to talk to whoever you’re with – try to identify everything you hear to take away your fear of the unknown. Plus, any animals out there aren’t really interested in you. They’re just raccoons going about their raccoon lives.

Aside from music, my other solutions are to adopt a “screw it all” attitude and force yourself to sleep, or pray for rain. Sleeping to the sound of raindrops is glorious.

Side note about animals: for the love of Britney and Beyoncé, put your food in sealed containers and put the containers in the car, lest you risk a visit from the third B (hint: it’s bears).

Love camping. Despite my wariness, I’ve grown to love camping. It’s like my husband used s’mores and leggings to trick me into becoming slightly outdoorsy. The woods are beautiful, the food is delicious, camp chairs are fun. I get to have weird, wonderful conversations with someone I love, and I get to do it next to a pretty fire.

One of the best parts about camping is breaking away from screens and deadlines to talk about the parts of life that are important. Or if you’re not into that, it’s a great time to have a few drinks and tell embarrassing stories about each other. Either way, you’ll come out bonded on a new level. And that, my newbie camper friend, is the whole point.

— Originally published on 30 On Tap

We just got back from Maine, where we spent the first 3 nights in Mount Desert Campground, located about a mile outside of Acadia National Park. The campground was insanely gorgeous and located right at the tip of the Somes Sound. Some of the tent sites even looked out over the water! It was some seriously beautiful stuff.

Our site had a wooden platform which kept the tent clean, and (camping enthusiasts, hold your shudders) there was a cabin that had wifi, wood, and ice cream for sale in the evening. Basically, I was two feet from falling into the luxurious world of glamping, and I was feeling it.

Look at this setup:

It’s like an REI ad, right?? I’m down with all major aspects of camping – I love the fire, I dig the s’mores. I’m even into hiking, a semi-new hobby that surprises everyone, maybe me the most.

While exploring Acadia National Park, Colin and I hiked the Beehive Trail, which was one of the hardest hikes I’ve done to date. Despite the elevation gain being less than 600 feet (trust me when I say that truly isn’t high), a good third of the trail was comprised of winding your way up the side of the mountain, using strategically placed iron rungs and handles for support. I had read about the trail beforehand and was prepared to bruise the shit out of my legs; all reviews said that the iron rungs weren’t spaced well for those under five feet tall. Seeing as I’m 5′ 1″, I threw myself into the hike like a full contact sport, and arrived at the top victoriously bleeding down my right knee. HIKE ACHIEVED.

Oddly, for all my risk-averse tendencies, I really enjoy hard obstacles like rock scrambling or tight spaces. What I can’t deal with are sheer drop offs and narrow paths! It’s ridiculous to me that I can shove my body into a crevice and haul myself up over it without a problem, but if my walking path is less than three feet and I can feel the elevation, I turn into a jiggly mess. Luckily, the Beehive Trail was chock full of the obstacles I like, while keeping the height issue to a minimum – much of the path directly followed the natural cuts of the granite, and almost every dangerous area had a short drop off. Basically, I knew if I bit it and fell, I wouldn’t fall far, and that macabre realization allowed me to let go and sling my body around like a bag of bricks.

Gooooo nature!

So, below is what the Beehive Trail looks like if you are Colin, standing above me, taking photos as I scramble my way up (and yes, he made me go down and redo the walk once he decided to take action shots, and YES, that was annoying. But I admit, pics are great.)

And this is what standing on a little granite ledge while waiting your turn to climb up looks like.

So this is where I falter when it comes to camping. I can handle the vast majority of the uncomfortable parts; the dirt is fine, no showers = great! (so lazy). I’m not the absolute worst when it comes to bugs, though I’m not a big fan of them.

What totally freaks me out is the night. I have what I consider a healthy, rational fear of the pitch blackness that surrounds a campsite once the sun sets. Never mind the fact that, on this trip, we were at the nicest campground I’ve ever seen. Never mind that it was incredibly family-oriented, so there were little kids everywhere. Hell, never mind the fact that we were about 40 feet from that wifi-enabled main cabin (that had porch lights on ALL night).

I was convinced a bear was going to eat me. Like, completely, solidly sure of this one fact.

If you’ve never camped before, you may not know just how loud the woods are at night. Every noise is amplified a thousand times over, until a leaf falling on your tent sounds like a snapping twig, and an actual snapping twig sounds like a bear planted itself next to your tent and is trying to figure out how to undo the zipper. Also, the woods are alarmingly wet, which no one told me. In the morning, things are covered in dew, which is fine and pretty, but at night, that translates into random dripping noises high above you at in the darkness.

I never sleep well when camping. The first time we went, Colin and I had ransacked the REI Garage Sale to get sleeping pads, new sleeping bags, a camp stove, AND what we thought would be an awesome new tent. We unrolled it at home, only to discover it was a 2 person backpacking tent that opened up directly onto the floor. We also got to the campsite after dark. I think I slept about 4 hours total over 2 nights.

Luckily, for this trip we upgraded to a nice 5 person Coleman tent that didn’t open up directly into dirt, and has a nice high roof and a built in rain fly. Which was helpful, because on the second and third nights it rained a TON. And that was when I learned that I can easily sleep in a tent as long as it’s pouring outside. Of course.

I have decided I have a love/hate relationship with camping. I was so glad to move on to a hotel for the rest of the week, and yet here I am at home, furiously Googling ways to afford a lightweight pop-up camper or a teardrop camper. Because while I’m not very keen on camping with just a thin sheet between me and the world, I do love the idea of a tiny little bed on wheels. I’ve discovered that you can rent a teardrop camper, and now I can’t stop looking at this site in Portland, and dreaming about what national park in Oregon I can find as a reason for us to get out there and rent one of these babies. Just look how cool they are: