More green RVs

Blogged about green RVS several months back. Here's an update.

“When people talk about conservation, they get so bogged down with recycling and living lightly they forget what they are trying to save," said Brian Brawdy, a 47-year-old former police investigator turned wilderness expert. “I want people to get out there and camp, hike, rock climb."

Damn right.

Glamping

We've commented on this in the past. The Times has a new article on Glamping.



Quite a spectacle.

Tent Trailers

My parents took us on long, epic camping trips that touched every state but Alaska and Hawaii. The first trips we used a tiny Nimrod Capri tent trailer, the later trips a Coleman Brandywine. These made it a real camping trip, rather than the 28 foot behemoths some of my friends parents had.

Seems like tent trailers are back.

Mr. Endter, 41, a special-education teacher, had done the math: flights for his family of four and renting a car would have cost around $3,000, which seemed prohibitive. He didn’t want a motor home. “I don’t want to sound like an elitist,” he said, “but I’ve never been interested in the hotel-room-on-wheels R.V. thing.” And Mr. Endter didn’t have a vehicle powerful enough to pull a full-sized pop-up camper. Then he read about the Go, released in stores in April, in an outdoors magazine.

My parents did the same calculations, and the trailer and the cheap campground fees allowed these trip to be four weeks in length.

Killing Camping

The Economist weighs in on why they think we don't go outside...

We have always blamed the decline in camping and interest in National parks on electronics, quoting the fifth-grader: “I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.” The Economists disagrees, and suggests that we should "blame conservationists, not video games."

Food for thought.

Read more at Treehugger.

Update: I don't want to give the impression that I agree with the Economist, but the notion that some Ntional Parks are less friendly for folks from today's society is worth considering.

Campout

This weekend is the 4th annual Great American Backyard Campout.

Learn more here.

Summer Camps

Winter is the time to plan for your summer schedule. Camps are a great experience for kids. I went to Camp Woodstock in Connecticut for several summers and I still remember many experiences there. The place made a difference in how I view the outdoors.

So how do you choose a summer camp?

This document provides some good advice.

The American Camp Association also has a search tool.

Fear

Read the first few chapters of Rod Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind and you can get a clear picture of what the early settlers from Europe thought of the wilds of the New World. The forests and mountains were dark, scary, and filled with evil. They would huddle in their cabins at night, worried about strange noises and ready to defend themselves from the bad things that lived out there. The only way to deal with this threat was to clear and tame the land, by bringing in light.

Shoot forward to the twentieth century, where camping was a favored pastime, a healthy and normal thing to do. We had pretty much gotten over the dark evil fears, although I remember reading Night of Grizzly when we were camped out in Glacier National Park, and it scared the heck out of me.

Today, we still have folks camping out in fairly large numbers, but some are suggesting that camping may not be a "normal" thing to do anymore. The normal thing, according to a columnist's words I read this morning, is to sit at home in front of the TV. Camping is scary and dangerous. There are so many dangers and the folks you might meet are not normal.

They suggest the proposed campground would attract strange people. Sadly, that's true.

Camping isn't something normal people do any more.

Normal people sit indoors, in front of the television. Their children also are indoors, but watching television in another room.

Has the information revolution pulled our society closer to the point that our ancestors were at? My answer is go camping.