Many people include a recreational vehicle in their preparedness planning. For some, it is a part of their “Get out of Dodge” plan. For others, it offers temporary accommodation at their retreat location. Neither of these scenarios is an element in the planning that my wife and I have done. But perhaps our experiences with our first camper will be informative to some SurvivalBlog readers in their planning, and entertaining to others.
Camping in Norway
A little more than 30 years ago, my family and I moved to Norway. Norway is a land of rugged natural beauty as well as gracious and helpful people. It is also a very expensive place to live, or even visit. It soon became clear that if we were going to enjoy the country’s rugged natural beauty, we were not going to do it by staying in hotels at night. First of all, there were not that many hotels. Secondly, we just could not afford it.
After diligent searching, we found two major types of accommodation for exploring new areas in Norway. During the children’s autumn vacation from school, when the weather was often poor, demand for rental cabins was down. At that time, it was often possible to rent a cabin at a fraction of what it might cost at other times of year. During the summer, camping offered a budget-friendly alternative for the traveler to rest his weary head at night.
I had camped with my parents in my early childhood, so it was not a new experience for me. We bought a used tent and some sleeping bags, loaded them up along with some canned goods and other groceries in the back of our Volvo 240 DL station wagon, and headed for the hills.
Tent camping with young children was interesting. Asking a group of three eager kids to hand one a tent pole while setting up an interior frame tent was an invitation to adventure as well as grave bodily harm. We froze in frosty mountain meadows and baked on the sunny shores of stunning fjords. We saw scenes of haunting beauty that still echo in our minds.
After about a decade in Norway, we moved back to the United States. A network of family and friends as well as more reasonable hotel and rental cabin rates made tent camping less of a necessity than it had been in Norway. We still used the tent occasionally, but with nothing like the frequency we had used it in Norway. It was no longer the only show in town.
Several years ago, we embarked on a new adventure: being grandparents. Our daughter and son-in-law were fruitful and multiplied. They decided to take the family camping, and invited us to come along. They bought a nice, used pop-up camper at an auction. During the time when they had only one child, the pop-up was large enough to accommodate all of us. When two more children came along, the parents and children stayed in the pop-up, and my wife and I broke out the tent.
For some inexplicable reason, the tent had become significantly more uncomfortable over the course of 30 years. The ground had become harder, bending over to set up the tent had become more difficult, and the interior of the tent had become smaller. We decided that maybe it was time to look for a camper of our own.Continue reading“Our First Camper, by The Novice”
