My husband and I have been camping, mostly with our tent, for 10 years. We’ve made some camping mistakes over the years. Most of this happened in our early years of marriage, communication might have played a part. Either way we have learned from the mistakes and our love for camping hasn’t deterred us.
Camping Mistake #1: Not making a packing list
This might be super simple and complete common sense. I just need to share that on one of our first trips ever camping together I thought I had packed everything from my list that I kept in my head.
Somehow I didn’t mentally check off pillows and condiments for our hot dogs, to name a few things. This happened at Weaver Lake BC at the forestry campsite. A convenience store is just “down the road”. Also our site was covered in bugs that got into EVERYTHING.
Make a packing list.
Start with basics and as things pop up in your head, WRITE IT DOWN. As you pack cross it off.
Camping Mistake #2: Not checking the weather ahead of time
We didn’t do this on another one of our earlier trips and didn’t know that at night the temperature was going to go below zero. Everyone else was in RV’s and giving my husband funny looks as he set up the tent. The resort on the other side of the lake liked our business as we ended up renting a cabin for the rest of the trip.
Check the weather, just do it……
Camping Mistake #2: Not researching or reserving campgrounds
We definitely have a list of campgrounds we will NOT camp at again. The location we will go back to but we will be reserving a campsite at a different campground.
In my top places to camp in BC and Alberta I mentioned Tofino. Yes, we will go back, it’s amazing there. But we will be booking ahead. We had such a bad experience at the campground we stayed at we actually cut our losses and left early.
This happened….the entire town ran out of water. We happened to score the best tent site. We weren’t camping in the open field and having to parallel park our vehicle in front of our site, like everyone else.
Research and Reserve
Despite all the above, we’ve made some great memories and so fun stories that my husband likes to bug me about.
I’ll never hear the end of the story another time we didn’t research and reserve and ended up tenting BESIDE an active train yard. By the way a long coal train backing up sounds like a shot gun going off over 100 times. Somehow my husband, who is a deep sleeper, was asleep and I woke him up, that wasn’t a good idea.
I hope this is helpful. As someone who didn’t grow up camping I’ve learned from these mistakes. We’ve learned as a couple to communicate better and just about do all the packing together so nothing is missed and spend the weeks ahead of a trip planning.
Plus they make great stories around the campfire while camping.
Happy Camping
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