# Are you a happy camper?



## Ingélou

Recently I posted a photo on Facebook of my brothers on a camping holiday that my parents took them on in 1959. We girls were sent to my gran's house for a fortnight, which I remember with pleasure. A friend commiserated with me on not getting the camping trip. But do you know what?

I hate camping! 

I remember a tent holiday at Robin Hood's Bay that I went on when I was seven or eight. The cold feel and plasticky smell of lilo beds and ground sheets - the wasps and flies that congregated round our open-air meals - the going-to-the-loo trips to the ditch at the corner of the farmer's field - the cold dank seaside air that meant I never felt warm - the claustrophobia of being trapped in a tent with my bossy & scornful older brothers, and never during the day being able to get away from my overbearing parents - the rubbery taste of the water in its plastic container.

Okay, I know camping is much more comfortable these days, with loos and hot water and tents you can stand up in. But I still think I'd want to have a proper bed to sleep in at night and a warm, relaxing room to sit in. 

What about you? Are you a happy camper? In heaven's name, why?

Please share your tales of joy or woe. I am sure they'll be thoroughly entertaining.

:tiphat: Thanks in advance for any replies


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## Art Rock

Loved it as a kid, hated it as a grown-up, have not done it since the mid 90s. My last night in a tent was in the Italian alps when a hailstorm ripped part of the tent apart, soaking all my clothes and other belongings. The next morning I dumped the tent in a rubbish bin and never looked back.


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## Ingélou

When I was in my teens, my father bought a caravan. We had it for a couple of years until he gave it up, having suffered a heart attack. 

I hated that too. Now I was trapped with my father's snoring from behind the screen - then my mother, a light sleeper, used to wake up to use the loo in the van and deliberately wake us up too, so that she wouldn't be disturbed if any of us had to get up later - I had the embarrassment of dealing with the usual female puberty stuff in front of my father and younger siblings - it got incredibly cold at night and we couldn't sleep - during the day, we were exiled from the caravan so that my parents could have some privacy - then there was 'getting in and out of the camp site', the whole family apart from the driver trying to lug or push the van through the mud that always clogged the gate to the field.

It was Hell on Wheels. 

And yet I understand that people go caravanning for pleasure...


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## elgar's ghost

The last time I was in a tent was on a muddy pitch at Manchester Rugby Football Club for a low-key rock festival about six or seven years ago. What also soured the experience was crawling from my tent in the morning and placing my hand in a newly-laid dog turd that was right next to the opening. Weather was vile and the over-used portable toilets ended up as an invitation to catch typhoid. Had a good time, though.


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## SiegendesLicht

The only drawback for me are limited shower opportunities. Apart from that, if the weather is right and if the place and company are also right, I love it.


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## mirepoix

Short answer: no, I'm not a happy camper. The hell with all that. Get me to a hotel with some food/wine/a suitable companion. Then go away and leave me alone. _Do not disturb_. Thanks.

Long answer: I've been camping three times. Well, two and a half. The first and best experience was as a child. My grandfather took me. Frankly, my grandfather was a raging alcoholic and a gambler, but by some 'miracle' he was sober/had money the whole weekend. It wasn't a perfect couple of days - the tent was an ancient eight man or ten man tent and had no fitted groundsheet - but it's one of my fond childhood memories. The second time I went camping I hit myself on the foot with an axe/hatchet and that put paid to the weekend. The last time saw us reach the site late at night and decide to sleep in the car. When we woke I decided it wasn't for me, and so took the young lady I was with to a hotel instead. If I recall correctly she wasn't the type for going camping anyway and so I got the glad eye from her.

The thing is, I'm perfectly capable of going camping. I grew up in a house with a shared outside toilet and I'm used to getting by with very little. When I was in Russia we'd often spend weekends at the dacha and for the first couple of years there we'd no electricity or anything like that. But I just don't like the whole idea of camping.


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## Guest

Camping on lumpy ground? At the mercy of the weather? I think camping is pretty close to a crime : loitering (with) intent!


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## joen_cph

Did a lot of budget travel camping in Europe, especially in my student years, but overall I have come to prefer the comfort of budget hotels. 

I still do a combination of biking and camping from time to time though, this summer for 2 nights on the coast of Northern Zealand, then one week on the Stevns peninsula, south of Copenhagen (a free yet organized site by the coastal cliffs), and finally 8 days with a rented bike on Corsica.


For big cities, I´d avoid it - though the very expensive accomodation in London might make me consider a good camp site there.

Camping can be great under the right circumstances - especially at a pretty spot with interesting surroundings & suitable weather.


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## Ingélou

An in-between experience, much in vogue in Britain in the earlier twentieth century, is The Holiday Camp.

I remember, just, one such that we went to when I was four, in Colwyn Bay. We had a chalet with two rooms - a lounge with a kettle that my parents and baby sister slept in, and a bedroom where I slept in a double bed with my big sister, and my brothers had a bunk bed. For meals we all went to a communal dining room, where before eating, we sang a comic song:
*Always eat when you are hungry.
Always drink when you are dry.
Always sleep when you are sleepy.
Don't stop breathing or you'll die.*
I didn't see this as comic, though. I took this advice very seriously. 

I remember that the Camp held a Fancy Dress competition.










My two brothers took part. Big Brother is on the far right, front row, posing as 'a witch doctor'. I remember going out on the moors picking bracken in the morning to make up his skirt.
Middle Brother* is on the same front row, second from the left - the boy next to him had the same idea, but my Bro makes the best girl, imo, because of the hair and glasses. It was quite a big thing to do in the 1950s and a source of great amusement in the family.
_(*Little Bro wasn't born till two years later.) _

In the 1930s, my mother's parents went to a work-related holiday camp where everyone took assumed names, much as on TC. My granny chose 'Sweet Nell of Old Drury', which the young blades quickly changed, with great glee, to 'Sweet Smell from the Brewery'!


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## violadude

I like bugs....as long as they don't become my roommates.

So no, I don't really like camping. But I love staying in log cabins or small, modest resorts like that in the woods.


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## Manxfeeder

I credit the Boy Scouts with giving me a healthy disdain for camping. Walking all that distance with an overly heavy and overloaded backpack, sleeping in a pup tent with my feet sticking out the doorflap because of too-long legs, trying to swallow undercooked hamburger and too-raw potatoes without gagging, then walking all that distance again with said backpack to get back to where I started taught me the joys of motel rooms. 

What sealed it for me was, one day rain was forecast, but our Scoutmaster sent us off anyway. At midnight, we were awakened with rivulets of water in our sleeping bags, and peeking from our tents, we discovered that God had chosen that night to rain on the just and the unjust. Packing up in pitch black and inch-deep mud, I left my book of verse beneath the bough and lost my desire to see if the wilderness were paradise enow. 

I still have the mud-caked boots as a reminder that man has conquered the elements, and this type of thing is pointless.


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## hpowders

One night my summer camp bunk went camping and I attempted to sleep on a hill in a sleeping bag and it was quite cold and breezy. Didn't sleep a wink that night. Never again!


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## Varick

I love camping, but I do it in a much different way. I've taken a number of survival courses from Tom Brown Jr. who is one of the greatest trackers in the world. He was raised by an old Apache elder who went by the name of "Grandfather." Since Tom Brown was a little boy, he and his best friend learned all the ways of survival by Grandfather (who was Tom's friend's actual grandfather).

What you learn in his survival courses is how to live warm, dry, well hydrated, well fed, and safe anywhere in the wilderness in North America with only the clothes on your back. As he explained, the tents, sleeping bags, huge backpacks filled with things only separate you from nature. So you learn how to build a very strong and waterproof dwelling using everything around you in about an hour or two. How to create fire, how to find a safe water source(s), how to gather and hunt food, always with a deep gratitude to the "creator" for everything that is provided to you.

For the first two times I camped after some of his courses, I took a tent along "just in case" but I only used it the first night of the first time. Since then, I never pack a tent. When I leave, I take apart my dwelling and scatter it leaving no trace of my presence always leaving the area I stayed in better than when I arrived. I carry my survival knife, clothes, some all natural soap, and just a few other things I've made over time (such as bowls, cups, and utensils) when I go camping.

I'm hoping one day to become a top student of his because when you are, and he feels you are ready, you go on his "special" course which he does every 3 or 4 years with only about 5 or 6 of his top students. All of his courses are a week long, but this one is 4 weeks long and invite only. There is no paying for this one:

He takes you to the mountains either in the North East or North West of the US in the middle of January. You are only allowed a pair of shoes, pair of pants, a T-shirt and sweatshirt. That's it! He tells you to go off on your own. He finds you in one week and you give him all your clothes, because by that time, you have made your own from animal skins.

Here's the kicker: The average weight *GAIN* in those four weeks is four pounds. He always says, if you are cold, de-hydrated, and hungry in a survival situation, then you know NOTHING about survival.

Yes, I do love camping. His courses have changed my life (as they do almost everyone who takes any of his courses).

V


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## Varick

Ingélou said:


> When I was in my teens, my father bought a caravan. We had it for a couple of years until he gave it up, having suffered a heart attack.
> 
> I hated that too. Now I was trapped with my father's snoring from behind the screen - then my mother, a light sleeper, used to wake up to use the loo in the van and deliberately wake us up too, so that she wouldn't be disturbed if any of us had to get up later - I had the embarrassment of dealing with the usual female puberty stuff in front of my father and younger siblings - it got incredibly cold at night and we couldn't sleep - during the day, we were exiled from the caravan so that my parents could have some privacy - then there was 'getting in and out of the camp site', the whole family apart from the driver trying to lug or push the van through the mud that always clogged the gate to the field.
> 
> It was Hell on Wheels.
> 
> And yet I understand that people go caravanning for pleasure...


One of my brothers has a caravan. The thing is the size of a tour bus (literally). The sides expand out, it has a four burner stove, oven, sink, dishwasher, Fridge, a decent sized shower stall & bathroom, flat screen TV (2), AC, heat, stereo system, DVD player, Washer & Dryer, every amenity you could possibly think of you would want or need in your own home. After he showed it to me and showed me all the cool and neat things in it, he then says, "Sue [his wife] and I love to go out camping." To which I replied, "Yeah Ted, nothing like 'Getting away from it all'."

He and his wife love it, so God bless them. I can see how it could be fun to tour all over the country and never need a hotel/motel room, but the very LAST thing I would ever call it is "camping." LOL

V


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## joen_cph

a bike, a tent, the shadow of a tree, a view of Corsican mountains 
+ a farm camping with a swimming pool & plenty of space 
... that´s not bad!









A small uncrowded camp site at a Norwegian fjord farm - from a bike trip last year, from Copenhagen via Jutland to Norway (Stavanger, Bergen) and back.


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## Richannes Wrahms

violadude said:


> I like bugs....as long as they don't become my roommates.
> 
> So no, I don't really like camping. But I love staying in log cabins or small, modest resorts like that in the woods.


That thing he said.


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## SiegendesLicht

I don't think I could endure the kind of survival course Varick described, but it looks like a very _spiritual_ experience. I hope to do a lot more camping and staying out in nature in the next years than I have done so far, even if not in such extreme nature. Somehow I can appreciate these experiences a lot more now, and somehow my increased enjoyment of nature is tied into my growing appreciation of classical music as well. It probably has to do with the fact that my favorite German Romantics drew a lot of their inspiration from nature, from the woods, mountains, rivers, changing times and seasons, not from five-star hotels.


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## Jos

Much prefer to rent a villa in Tuscany or stay in a hotel in Berlin or Budapest (soon !! ) 
Used to go camping as a student, on a motorbike. The rough holidays is what my wife (then girlfriend) calls them. 4 weeks on a shoestring through Southern Europe. Camping in the wild, no showers or other comforts. Snakes and scorpions in tent. Liked it then, hate it now.


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## brotagonist

Yes, I do enjoy it a lot. I admit that I haven't done any for about 6 years, even though I meant to, but, due to ugly gasoline prices, I have been limiting my frequent summertime trips to day trips. Also, eating out is expensive, so I like to cook at home, another reason to stay closer to home.

I haven't acquired a camp stove yet. All I own is a really nice tent, a sleeping bag that's sometimes too hot, one of those thin air mattresses that is not much wider than a plank  and even a very nice bivouac that I have yet to use 

I used to do a fair amount of motorcycle camping: ride the bike out somewhere beautiful, and set up camp after about 7 hours in the saddle, make a bonfire and hit the sack after a couple of hours. Repeat every day for as many as the money lasts :lol: I even went to the Yukon, Arizona and Colorado a few times!

I also enjoy setting up camp in a scenic natural environment and using it as a base camp for hiking during the day. I wouldn't mind getting a dirt bike or ATV and doing the same thing, but being able to go even further into the wilds.

The kind of camping I detest is sitting around in the camp doing nothing, just idly loafing, drinking, making noise, etc., often in those domesticated trailer parks with television and wi-fi and screaming kids running around


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## Centropolis

Love it. For the past 10 years, I've went camping 5 or 6 times every year from spring to fall. I have yet to try winter camping though. Not sure if I will survive it. (I live in Toronto so winter is like -15 to -20 Celsius at night during January and February.)


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## Vaneyes

I recall a New Yorker telling me, "When you leave NYC, you're camping out." I'm happy, in or out of The City, The Big Apple, Gotham.

Seriously, though, "I'm in two minds about it." If I have armed guards on the perimeter, I'm okay with camping.


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## Krummhorn

Tent camped for years when I was a Boy Scout and later as an adult leader. Got wet a number of nights in the rain, too, but everything dried out the next day.

Later in life I much prefer four walls and a comfy bed and an electrical outlet for my C-Pap machine. Although we have done some camping in recent years:


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## KenOC

Krummhorn said:


> Later in life I much prefer four walls and a comfy bed and an electrical outlet for my C-Pap machine.


I loved camping for years. But yeah, not having that CPAP is a problem. I have a wild theory that the older Haydn could have used one of those (doesn't it fit the symptoms?) I'm not sure where he could have plugged it in either.


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## Marsden

One goal this winter is to get trapped in a mountain cabin by a snowstorm, with just my dog, a lot of firewood, food, and a good friend. Living outdoors is for the birds, though.


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## Headphone Hermit

Ingélou said:


> I remember that the Camp held a Fancy Dress competition.


I hope the guy in the pyjamas won - what imagination for a fancy dress competition


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## Headphone Hermit

I went camping on my honeymoon and for years I thought I hated camping

Then, after being divorced, I went again and loved it

Guess it wasn't the tent that made the honeymoon an unpleasant experience


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## LancsMan

Well so far this year I've spent 34 nights under canvas - but it'll be next spring before I get the tent out again. 

As a stiff upper lip English man there's something about the discomforts of camping that appeals to me. Taking pleasure in small luxuries (like a hot drink on a cold evening - or even a wee dram of scotch). 

Most of my camping takes place in camp sites with essentials like hot showers. However my last trip was wild camping on the moor tops of the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire, in a bivi bag. That's a goretex waterproof bag that goes over your sleeping bag. It has the critical one essential of a mosquito net to keep the bugs from joining me. Great sleeping with just that mosquito net between my face and the stars.


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## Badinerie

Been camping many times and enjoyed it....... when the organiser did they're homework or we had decent equipment.
The only time I hated it was in the Army Cadets. WW2 surplus equipment, miserly thin uniforms, leaky boots and sharing a small non-waterproof tent with stinky teenage boys. Not quite the Glamping you get nowdays!


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## Headphone Hermit

^^^ "I never fail to be totally underwhelmed by modern technology" .... so you liked the WW2 surplus equipment, thin uniforms, leaky boots and non-waterproof tent and would be underwhelmed by microfibre warm clothing, gortex boots that keep your feet warm and dry, and a waterproof tent with adequate ventilation?  

Well, each to their own, I suppose :lol:


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## Figleaf

Headphone Hermit said:


> I went camping on my honeymoon and for years I thought I hated camping
> 
> Then, after being divorced, I went again and loved it
> 
> Guess it wasn't the tent that made the honeymoon an unpleasant experience


Yes, sleeping outdoors is very sexy in theory, but the resulting personal hygiene issues are not! To say nothing of the other difficulties involved with being cooped up in a confined space with somebody you really don't want to fall out with 

When I went to Glastonbury long after I separated, it was just me and the kids. Unlike most other activities where you're surrounded by couples, I never felt awkward or like I was missing out on something. Camping- probably not only at festivals- does seem to break down some of the social barriers that make some activities awkward for those of us who don't fit the mould.


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## hpowders

violadude said:


> I like bugs....as long as they don't become my roommates.
> 
> So no, I don't really like camping. But I love staying in log cabins or small, modest resorts like that in the woods.


Like people, they are only trying to survive. Why you be bugged?


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## ArtMusic

I don't mind camping, it all has to do with who's going as that makes all the difference to me anyway.


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## Guest

Sounds like hell.


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## Posie

There is a beautiful park in the Appalachians where my cousins and I make a camping trip almost every year. Our last trip was about a month ago.

The morning we left, I went out to the lake surrounded by beautiful mountains. The weaves of fog running across the lake on this cloudy morning were indescribably beautiful! I felt like I was in a medieval fantasy world. I plugged in my headphones and played Isoldes Liebestod to intensify the experience. :angel:


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## Richannes Wrahms

marinasabina said:


> There is a beautiful park in the Appalachians where my cousins and I make a camping trip almost every year. Our last trip was about a month ago.
> 
> The morning we left, I went out to the lake surrounded by beautiful mountains. The weaves of fog running across the lake on this cloudy morning were indescribably beautiful!


Mountains have inspired plenty of composers, including the Appalachians.


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## Piwikiwi

My father always says: "We didn't go through 10,000 years of civilization to go back to sleeping in a tent."


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## Posie

This is how it looked, only overcast with a LOT more fog.


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## SiegendesLicht

Piwikiwi said:


> My father always says: "We didn't go through 10,000 years of civilization to go back to sleeping in a tent."


It seems the more we evolve, in the sense of technologies and "creature comforts" the farther we distance ourselves from nature. Maybe we can get away with it now, but some day in the future nothing good will come out of it.


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## Piwikiwi

SiegendesLicht said:


> It seems the more we evolve, in the sense of technologies and "creature comforts" the farther we distance ourselves from nature. Maybe we can get away with it now, but some day in the future nothing good will come out of it.


But nature is awful, sure it looks pretty from a distance but it is so cruel and harsh. You don't see the deer walking around with an broken infected leg in nature documentaries, or the baby animals that starve to death because there isn't enough food. Nature is horrible and it is much better to be away from it.


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## Ingélou

^^^^^^^ You're both right! 

Fresh air, sunshine, country views & birdsong can all be appreciated without sleeping in a tent - thank goodness!


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## SiegendesLicht

Sure it is cruel and harsh, but somehow only a few hundred years ago people lived a lot closer to nature, saw her harshness face to face and still retained their humanity, ability to bond with each other and their creative faculties. What the future of "civilized" humanity seems to be like, is people becoming ever weaker physically, mentally and spiritually, unable to live a day without their air-conditioned houses, to get anywhere without their self-driving cars (isn't someone already working on those?), to know anything without internet, people losing their faculties of memory (one can look anything up online) and concentration (lost in the constant stream of entertainment), becoming very thin-skinned and incapable of dealing with any sort of negative emotion without taking meds, incapable of long-time relationships or love where one has to make sacrifices, the whole human society becoming atomized (it already is) with every man going his own way and eventually unable to go on like this, being destroyed by Nature and her powers. 

I know, this sounds very pessimistic, and I hope our societies (I mean the most civilized, Western ones first of all) can make a turnaround. You know, we have survived anything before, maybe we can survive the modern egalitarian civilization too.


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## science

In one particular environment - the North American "mountain west" - I can be pretty hardcore. I know what I'm doing out there, and I can have a good time doing it. Give me a well-stocked backpack (with lots of oatmeal, please) and pick me up in a week. 

But pretty much everywhere else I'm nervous about the bugs, the plants, and how do we know there aren't any snakes here? All the same, I intend to conquer the Appalachian Trail someday, if the copperheads don't get me.


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## science

Ingélou said:


> Please share your tales of joy or woe.


Well, my favorite... I'm sorry because this involves someone else's suffering but it was instructive to me... happened when I was in sixth grade. I was the "patrol leader" in the Boy Scouts ("very big deal") and so I got the newbie in my tent on a Mother's Day weekend in the mountains near Thermopolis, Wyoming, where there are some old Native American petroglyphs. He'd never been camping... and he never would be again, I suspect!

Naturally, camping in May in Wyoming, we got about four feet of snow overnight. Trees were falling down. Kids' tents were falling down on top of them. We had to pack up and get out around five in the morning.

But first, my tent-mate got hypothermia. I'd read about it, learned about it, but it was something to behold. Complaining that he was too cold, he got OUT of his sleeping bag, took his clothes off, and refused to get back in, insisting on huddling in the corner of the tent, with all that snow pressing on his bare skin through only that thin layer of... plastic or whatever the tent was. (That kind of irrationality is a symptom of fairly severe hypothermia.)

For a few minutes I just tried to talk him back into his sleeping bag, telling him he was crazy, but then there was a flash... I realized this was hypothermia and I was like, wow, I'm like a real doctor out here in the wilderness! It was the first time that anything I'd learned in the Boy Scouts really mattered to someone. So, getting out of my perfectly cozy sleeping bag... I went to get the adults, who basically scolded the kid until he got into a van to warm up.

OK, Boy Scouts story #2. My first time sleeping in a snow cave, I was a typically stupid little kid, and I left my clothing outside of my sleeping bag. I woke up in the morning, and it was frozen on the floor of the cave, exactly as if it'd been in a freezer for weeks. So, what to do? I considered bringing it into my sleeping bag and warming it up, but there was an obvious problem with that idea.... I wound up running in my underwear through about four feet of snow (almost as high as I was) for about a hundred yards to the nearest cabin, where I put my clothes on the furnace until they thawed and warmed. That was a mistake I did not repeat!

One last story that doesn't make me out so badly. Once I was all grown up and confident in the woods, my best friend and I took my younger brothers (12 & 13 years younger than I am; they must've been 9 and 10 or so at the time) camping for about a week around Spruce Knob, West Virginia. Very pretty country if you can get out to it. Almost compares to Wyoming, which is the nicest thing I can say about country. So every night I let my brothers build the fires while my friend and I just sat around being lazy.... Naturally, on the last night, my brothers come to me and say they've only got one match left to light the fire. I was like, what happened to the rest? We started with a box of 500 or something. They'd used 499 matches lighting like 3 fires. So there we were with raw potatoes and one match. That was the most careful I ever was lighting a fire, but we got that fire lit! The best baked potatoes I've ever had, bar none. If only my old Scout masters had seen me in action that night, they'd've been proud.


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## science

Piwikiwi said:


> My father always says: "We didn't go through 10,000 years of civilization to go back to sleeping in a tent."


We went through 10,000 years of civilization to get thermolite fiber in our sleeping bags!

Well, and also central heating in well-insulated homes, with well-stocked refrigerators. So I see his point.


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## Ingélou

There are some great posts on this thread. Thank you! :tiphat:


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## science

SiegendesLicht said:


> Sure it is cruel and harsh, but somehow only a few hundred years ago people lived a lot closer to nature, saw her harshness face to face and still retained their humanity, ability to bond with each other and their creative faculties. What the future of "civilized" humanity seems to be like, is people becoming ever weaker physically, mentally and spiritually, unable to live a day without their air-conditioned houses, to get anywhere without their self-driving cars (isn't someone already working on those?), to know anything without internet, people losing their faculties of memory (one can look anything up online) and concentration (lost in the constant stream of entertainment), becoming very thin-skinned and incapable of dealing with any sort of negative emotion without taking meds, incapable of long-time relationships or love where one has to make sacrifices, the whole human society becoming atomized (it already is) with every man going his own way and eventually unable to go on like this, being destroyed by Nature and her powers.
> 
> I know, this sounds very pessimistic, and I hope our societies (I mean the most civilized, Western ones first of all) can make a turnaround. You know, we have survived anything before, maybe we can survive the modern egalitarian civilization too.


There's a lot too this. I'll agree that we have a much lower tolerance for pain than (most of) our ancestors. That's a matter of conditioning, because we've grown up in such ease and wealth, with hot water at the turn of a knob, pain-killers for every pain, etc.

Before I get critical, I want to begin emphasizing the value of modernity. There are so many people alive in our societies right now enjoying interesting and productive lives who would've been born dead a century ago, and more who would've died within the first few months, and more who would've died later in their childhood. Look at the difference between what Ebola can do in a poor African country, where people live in conditions similar to what we all lived in two hundred years ago, and what it does in the USA, with a modern healthcare system. Also, starvation is a thing of the past in any moderately-developed country. We don't even doubt that the store will have food. Violent crime is a tiny fraction of what it used to be - it used to be dangerous to walk through a forest with a cart load of wool cloth, but we can now travel unarmed, carrying tens of thousands of dollars across thousands of miles without a moment of fear. And, in most modern countries, we've got a degree of freedom that even our ancestors' nobles couldn't have imagined - freedom to doubt the official religion, freedom to move, to invest money, to publish criticism of government policy, to marry foreigners.... We don't have to scurry around in fear of aristocrats, shaping every sentence and action to please them. That's a big freakin' deal.

That's some huge and wonderful progress. But...

I suspect that in many important, deep ways modern life is much LESS satisfying than premodern life. We live further from our families, seeing them less often; instead, we're surrounded by strangers to such a degree that we're actually surprised to run into someone we know on a city street. We stay up late at night, messing with our Circadian rhythms with artificial light, and allow ourselves too little sleep. We work with people that we hate without ever yelling at them. On and on and on, we live unnaturally, and I suspect that on a daily, hourly basis we have loads more stress than our ancestors did. Even the fact of living in societies without clear social classes can be stressful, because we're always judged, whereas our ancestors were just what they were (slaves, peasants, bourgeois, nobles, whatever) and for the most part there was much less role for ambition or failure in their lives.

On a romantic, level, I think it's interesting how alienated we are from the material of our lives. I have almost no idea what my computer screen is made of or how it's made or how it works. At first glance, no one two hundred years ago had anything like that. It's complicated, actually. If we care to find out, we have a lot more knowledge of what substances like "wood," "water," or "granite" are than our ancestors did. But if you take for granted, as they usually did, that "wood" is just "wood," or, "granite" is just "granite," then everything around them was made of things they understood. They had a pretty good idea what the walls of their houses were made of; not one in a thousand of us can tell what "drywall" is, where it comes from, how it is made. They knew what their clothes were made of; you'll ask a lot of people what lycra is before you'll get a good answer. And what's for dinner? Instant mashed potatoes sexed up with tartrazine. Naturally!

It's interesting to me that we take this material alienation so for granted. When I was a little kid I was so fascinated with glass, but I couldn't understand what the encyclopedia said about it, and no one could tell me what it was! "Melted sand" would've given me a lot of satisfaction, but no one even knew this.

On the other end of this puzzle is the fun question, how do we know what stuff is made of? Even something simple like water - if I doubt that a tiny particle of water consists of two hydrogens and an oxygen with covalent bonds, who can prove it to me?

Of course that gets to the extreme specialization of modern life. I've spent the last 8 years of my life thinking about almost nothing but how to teach history and literature more effectively. Some very smart person out there somewhere has spent the last 8 years of her life thinking about almost nothing but how cell-phone screens should look. Someone else out there spent that time thinking about how to make the mass production of, oh, say, polybenzimidazole fiber (thanks, wikipedia!) a little cheaper.

What it all comes down to is that we live in a world that we have almost no hope of understanding. If you figure out what your clothes are made of, you'll never know how your cell phone's battery works; if you figure out both of those, you'll never understand healthcare policy or trade finance or Roman religion or the evolutionary relationships among flatworms.

Our ancestors didn't imagine that anyone would understand this stuff, as God's speech to Job in the whirlwind shows, so they lived with an ignorance that they imagined was general. We live with an ignorance that we accept out of inevitable intellectual exhaustion. That's an interesting difference. Implicitly, we are often blamed for not knowing this stuff!

Of course all this is mere romanticism; the thing that matters (I suspect) is our weirdo personal lives, surrounded by strangers, hoping basically for their indifference, cooperating with people we don't like very much on tasks that don't mean much more to us than a paycheck, rarely seeing parents or siblings, in which almost any normal human emotion is a weakness. (Bored? That's too bad! It's time to work! Angry? Keep it to yourself! We've got work to do! Sad? Work! Interested in something other than your work? Too bad!)

Huddling together with our family in the darkness for fear of demons and witches (because we didn't understand the first thing about diseases), trying to save enough grain to get through the winter, accepting with resignation the occasional rape by the local nobility's bad boy, patching together rags stuffed with weeds for winter coats, fearing every stranger who wanders into the village... it was probably a more psychologically satisfying lifestyle, but I'm not going back!


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## Figleaf

Science: if you think that there are no clear social classes any more then you obviously haven't been to the UK 

Fantastic, well written post by the way. :tiphat:


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## BalalaikaBoy

Figleaf said:


> Science: if you think that there are no clear social classes any more then you obviously haven't been to the UK
> Fantastic, well written post by the way. :tiphat:


that you're from the Southeast makes it even more apparent (northerners seem a little more egalitarian)


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## Tristan

Yes, I am a fan of camping and backpacking. I've been doing it since I was a kid. Now, as a kid, we'd stay in crowded campgrounds sometimes with facilities and everything--that's not really what I like anymore. I'd rather be out in the wilderness away from cell phone signals and man's presence. 

I still prefer mountain biking to camping. I'd rather be on a bike going through mountain trails than I would hiking and carrying a tent on my back. Doesn't mean I don't enjoy it. Last year my best friend and I backpacked all around Desolation Wilderness in eastern California--no facilities there, that's for sure. We hiked many miles around that place--that was a true camping experience for me. For me, it's all about the scenery. There's nothing like being up there and seeing this everywhere you go:


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## trazom

To be honest, I really wanted to be the adventurer, wilderness-loving, free spirit; but after going through puberty i don't know what happened. My personality did a 180 and I went from loving the outdoors, playing outside, being physically coordinated and more active in sports to reading books, listening to music, and admiring nature from a distance. I'm still that way, and I like being comfortable which doesn't include sleeping outside on the ground. Oh now I remember what it was: the psychological trauma I suffered from middle school that I still haven't completely recovered from.


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## Varick

science said:


> There's a lot too this. I'll agree that we have a much lower tolerance for pain than (most of) our ancestors. That's a matter of conditioning, because we've grown up in such ease and wealth, with hot water at the turn of a knob, pain-killers for every pain, etc.
> 
> Before I get critical, I want to begin emphasizing the value of modernity. There are so many people alive in our societies right now enjoying interesting and productive lives who would've been born dead a century ago, and more who would've died within the first few months, and more who would've died later in their childhood. Look at the difference between what Ebola can do in a poor African country, where people live in conditions similar to what we all lived in two hundred years ago, and what it does in the USA, with a modern healthcare system. Also, starvation is a thing of the past in any moderately-developed country. We don't even doubt that the store will have food. Violent crime is a tiny fraction of what it used to be - it used to be dangerous to walk through a forest with a cart load of wool cloth, but we can now travel unarmed, carrying tens of thousands of dollars across thousands of miles without a moment of fear. And, in most modern countries, we've got a degree of freedom that even our ancestors' nobles couldn't have imagined - freedom to doubt the official religion, freedom to move, to invest money, to publish criticism of government policy, to marry foreigners.... We don't have to scurry around in fear of aristocrats, shaping every sentence and action to please them. That's a big freakin' deal.
> 
> That's some huge and wonderful progress. But...
> 
> I suspect that in many important, deep ways modern life is much LESS satisfying than premodern life. We live further from our families, seeing them less often; instead, we're surrounded by strangers to such a degree that we're actually surprised to run into someone we know on a city street. We stay up late at night, messing with our Circadian rhythms with artificial light, and allow ourselves too little sleep. We work with people that we hate without ever yelling at them. On and on and on, we live unnaturally, and I suspect that on a daily, hourly basis we have loads more stress than our ancestors did. Even the fact of living in societies without clear social classes can be stressful, because we're always judged, whereas our ancestors were just what they were (slaves, peasants, bourgeois, nobles, whatever) and for the most part there was much less role for ambition or failure in their lives.
> 
> On a romantic, level, I think it's interesting how alienated we are from the material of our lives. I have almost no idea what my computer screen is made of or how it's made or how it works. At first glance, no one two hundred years ago had anything like that. It's complicated, actually. If we care to find out, we have a lot more knowledge of what substances like "wood," "water," or "granite" are than our ancestors did. But if you take for granted, as they usually did, that "wood" is just "wood," or, "granite" is just "granite," then everything around them was made of things they understood. They had a pretty good idea what the walls of their houses were made of; not one in a thousand of us can tell what "drywall" is, where it comes from, how it is made. They knew what their clothes were made of; you'll ask a lot of people what lycra is before you'll get a good answer. And what's for dinner? Instant mashed potatoes sexed up with tartrazine. Naturally!
> 
> It's interesting to me that we take this material alienation so for granted. When I was a little kid I was so fascinated with glass, but I couldn't understand what the encyclopedia said about it, and no one could tell me what it was! "Melted sand" would've given me a lot of satisfaction, but no one even knew this.
> 
> On the other end of this puzzle is the fun question, how do we know what stuff is made of? Even something simple like water - if I doubt that a tiny particle of water consists of two hydrogens and an oxygen with covalent bonds, who can prove it to me?
> 
> Of course that gets to the extreme specialization of modern life. I've spent the last 8 years of my life thinking about almost nothing but how to teach history and literature more effectively. Some very smart person out there somewhere has spent the last 8 years of her life thinking about almost nothing but how cell-phone screens should look. Someone else out there spent that time thinking about how to make the mass production of, oh, say, polybenzimidazole fiber (thanks, wikipedia!) a little cheaper.
> 
> What it all comes down to is that we live in a world that we have almost no hope of understanding. If you figure out what your clothes are made of, you'll never know how your cell phone's battery works; if you figure out both of those, you'll never understand healthcare policy or trade finance or Roman religion or the evolutionary relationships among flatworms.
> 
> Our ancestors didn't imagine that anyone would understand this stuff, as God's speech to Job in the whirlwind shows, so they lived with an ignorance that they imagined was general. We live with an ignorance that we accept out of inevitable intellectual exhaustion. That's an interesting difference. Implicitly, we are often blamed for not knowing this stuff!
> 
> Of course all this is mere romanticism; the thing that matters (I suspect) is our weirdo personal lives, surrounded by strangers, hoping basically for their indifference, cooperating with people we don't like very much on tasks that don't mean much more to us than a paycheck, rarely seeing parents or siblings, in which almost any normal human emotion is a weakness. (Bored? That's too bad! It's time to work! Angry? Keep it to yourself! We've got work to do! Sad? Work! Interested in something other than your work? Too bad!)
> 
> Huddling together with our family in the darkness for fear of demons and witches (because we didn't understand the first thing about diseases), trying to save enough grain to get through the winter, accepting with resignation the occasional rape by the local nobility's bad boy, patching together rags stuffed with weeds for winter coats, fearing every stranger who wanders into the village... it was probably a more psychologically satisfying lifestyle, but I'm not going back!


Outstanding post Science!

V


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## Varick

SiegendesLicht said:


> Sure it is cruel and harsh, but somehow only a few hundred years ago people lived a lot closer to nature, saw her harshness face to face and still retained their humanity, ability to bond with each other and their creative faculties. What the future of "civilized" humanity seems to be like, is people becoming ever weaker physically, mentally and spiritually, unable to live a day without their air-conditioned houses, to get anywhere without their self-driving cars (isn't someone already working on those?), to know anything without internet, people losing their faculties of memory (one can look anything up online) and concentration (lost in the constant stream of entertainment), becoming very thin-skinned and incapable of dealing with any sort of negative emotion without taking meds, incapable of long-time relationships or love where one has to make sacrifices, the whole human society becoming atomized (it already is) with every man going his own way and eventually unable to go on like this, being destroyed by Nature and her powers.
> 
> I know, this sounds very pessimistic, and I hope our societies (I mean the most civilized, Western ones first of all) can make a turnaround. You know, we have survived anything before, maybe we can survive the modern egalitarian civilization too.


Some fine points here. But as Science's post above, there must be a balance struck. The balance between being close to nature, being close to God (If you believe), and living in the modern material world. Finding a balance between all of them is the trick (finding a balance everywhere in life is the trick). They can all coexist well if you find that balance.

I posted on the first page on how I go "camping." Most people can't do it that way. I've had "hard-core" campers say it wasn't for them. I also love the fact that there are so many life saving medicines and medical procedures that save lives, the fact I can order my cigars and scotch from the comfort of my home via my computer, that I can listen to GREAT music anytime I like. That I can get from NYC to Rome in less than 24 hours. That I can talk to someone in Japan practically instantly from the other side of the globe.

These are all wonderful things. Balance is the key. You have to take the bad with the good. For every Yin, there is a Yang.

V


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## georgedelorean

Haven't been camping in many years, however I did enjoy it whenever I went.


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## Steve1087

Have camped in one form or another most of my life. Used to go camping and backpacking in my younger days, then when the family came along a caravan seemed more practical. Have currently got a motorhome but I also tent camp on my scooter. The tent is just less hassle than looking for a hotel or b & b. I try to look for a good weather forecast though.


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## Pugg

No - it's cramped and uncomfortable, will do it for me.


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## Ingélou

Pugg said:


> No - it's cramped and uncomfortable, will do it for me.


:tiphat: Spot on! 
- Plus cold & wet (quite often), difficult (in the olden days) re toilet facilities, and leaves you open to wasps and midges. 
Nope - give me a hotel any day.


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