Easy Tips

Camping with children can be a scary undertaking.  Here are a few things we do to keep things simple.

1. Build slowly.  We use birthday/Christmas/bonus money for building into what we want for future camping trips.  This even included our car choices, once the old cars needed to be replaced.  We cannot always control what we can afford, but if you look at your life and think about investing into an outdoors heritage for your family, over time you will begin to see options that you did not realize you had before!
2. Train your kids from youth/infancy.  Don't wait until they are big kids.  Teach them stick safety, fire safety, how to treat a zipper, how to set up a tent... etc.  It all works to build their successful enjoyment of camping trips (and yours too).  If you cannot make it to a park, just camp in your living room or back yard on a weekend.  You'd be surprised how motivated kids will get about this... and then they will be less likely to blow out your tent zipper on a trip with no refuge from bugs, because you have practiced with them already!
3. Pack minimally.  Only one set of clothes per child, plus the ones they are wearing on their back.  Here is a way to keep laundry going at the site.
4. Have a separate igloo as a fridge, than the one you use for drinking water.  Ice the storage igloo down a day in advance with a few frozen gallon jugs of water (make sure you pour out some of the water before freezing, to allow for expanding ice).  We use a medium or large igloo to store food, and a 5-gallon upright for ice water.  In the end we only purchase two bags of 8 lbs of ice (16 lbs total) for an entire weekend of camping, one for each igloo.  It's all to save our food from spoiling, which saves money.
5. We like to use one set of dishes for the whole family for the whole camping time.  Here is how to keep dishes going simply.
6. Over the past 10 years, we have camped or traveled so many times that I have made a checklist for packing.  The best part was the day I realized it would be fastest to have it sorted by room, and by the day I could pack it in advance.  It makes a huge difference to attack things from that perspective.  You can see my list here.  Hope it helps!