Top Camping Tips Competition
Seeing that we are now in September and I seem to be coming down with some lurg I thought I’d better quickly announce the 3 winners of our Top Camping Tips Competition who will be receiving a copy each of Dixe Wills‘ new tiny campsites book that the folks at Cool Camping very kindly donated as prizes. There were some great suggestions, but our faves were as follows:
Emma Bradshaw: always take a flask of tea and freshly baked cake to eat on arrival at a campsite, before you start task of pitching your tent!
I love a bit of tea and cake, and the idea of having some before you put up your tent is a top tip particularly if you’ve had to lug a 27 kilo+ Bell Tent like mine to your pitch.
Claire Hopkins: Use a rigid cool box (eski in australia) with milk and meat frozen to keep it fresh for 2 days and it will keep beer and fizz cold too!
Now anything to keep beer and fizz cool floats my boat, even if you have to bring some food along too. I wonder if you can freeze cake?
Sarah Yelling: My best tip is to create an excel spread sheet check list. Then whatever you forget you can update it and remember it next time. If you forget knickers for instance then this needs to be separate and not just have clothes on the list!!!!! Oh and dry hair shampoo!
Well, it’s obviously very important not to forget your knickers on a camping trip!
There were other suggestions we liked, such as the Rochelle Family’s suggestion of taking along an inflatable dinghy for their one year old toddler. Not only is it great fun on the water, but can also be used as a ball pit, then turned upside down to become a bouncy “castle” before being used as a bath. Guess they could also have have used it as a travel cot.
There was also the suggestion by John or Jenny Wilson from Best French Campsites to take stackable basins, so that when you head to do your dirty dishes you always have a basin with the dirty ones in (the top basin) as well as a nice clean basin to load your clean ones into. This avoids any direct contact with the sometimes not particularly clean basins on campsites which sometimes have the previous person’s food scraps in them! Must go and get myself another Flexitub.
Nick Wilson had a whole host of tips including: taking fresh pasta as it takes no time at all to cook, leaving all your gas for spending time on the all important sauce; how rice will continue to cook in it’s pan with a lid on, so you can take it off the heat earlier than you’d think; making sure you put the hot pot on something that will stop it losing heat, like a teapot stand or something; using trays as they save space compared to a table; pitching your tent in a westward direction to avoid the morning sun and make sure the zips are closed before sundown to keep the tent warm; and that he never leaves home without earplugs.
We were, however, a bit confused about the suggestion that couples should take nappy bags and babywipes as there was no mention of whether this was for them or for their children. Perhaps, it’s for those people who forget their knickers, so can fashion a pair from the nappy bag … nice!
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