Campcraft (Guest Post by Adam)

When I was younger, I was enrolled in Scouts. It was a great experience and I learned a tonne about living outside the comforts (and confines) of modem society. There was an achievement system based on badges, which as most of you could probably guess, I was REALLY into. One of the badges was Campcraft, a badge based on how well you could plan, use, and maintain a campsite. Anytime you are spending the night outside of your normal dwelling you are likely doing some sort of campcraft. Rearranging luggage in the trunk of your car, looking for unnecessary items to jettison from an overloaded backpack and starting a fire all fall into campcraft in my books. It's an acquired skill, but not a hard one for people who like to solve problems and make things comfortable.

Riva hasn't done a lot of camping in recent memory, which is why it surprised me that she suggest we camp during half our road trip. I was wondering how her campcraft would come along during the trip, or if the experience would just end in a litany of bug bites and tears. Day five has started and she has almost perfected her creature comforts by identifying strategic locations of DEET-laced bug dope, corralling all the 'night needs' into a small stuff sack and implementing an efficient garbage disposal strategy. Not to mention, being able to setup our tent in a sub five minutes, efficiency usually enjoyed only by seasoned outdoors people. Over the next few days, I'm sure she will meet the requirements to have earned her Campcraft badge.

As for me, I've been in charge of the keeping both us and our food cool in the American south in August. Not an easy feat when the temperature are regularly in the high 90s and low 100s. Keeping the food cool hasn't been exciting, buy ice, lug cooler out of trunk, put ice in the cooler, drain the icewater from the cooler in the morning and at night. Bulky, cumbersome, inefficient...the search for a better cooler will begin when we get back to DC. Lighter-weight, smaller, better insulated. We purposely planned the trip down the coast so we could spend lots of time at the beach and in the water and keep our temps cool through the afternoon. When night time rolls around and it's time to head to bed, it becomes a little more challenging. Our tent (MEC Tarn 2, best tent ever), is really well ventilated; however having two people sleeping on hot sand heats up the tent fairly quickly. We sweated it out on our first night in Oregon Inlet, but the following morning I discovered our neighbours had an interesting setup. A poor man's air conditioner: an icebox with a battery operated fan blowing the cool air onto them. We set out that morning for an outdoor store or bigbox store to find a battery operated fan. We ended up at Kmart (who knew they still existed?) and picked up a large and small "O2 Cool" battery operated fans. I can't remember the last time a bought D batteries, but I bought twelve of them that day (I bought Raymovac because my friend Michael Jordan used to endorse them). Next campcraft task was to rig them up inside our tent for optimal cooling convection. I placed the big fan by our feet to take advantage of the natural conical shape of our tent, and rigged up some bungee cords through the gear loft tabs to suspend the smaller fan. A few micro-adjustments later, and we have a great setup to keep us cool all night long.

The fan setup isn't exactly a roughing it, but the one thing I learned by trial and error in camping (and in life) is to always have the right gear for your activity.