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Saturday, January 05, 2008 - (see all news for this day)

successes & lessons learned for next time - 11:06 AM
(filed under 'general')

i think i did really well preparing for camping at the woodford folk festival. some ideas or things (which at first i thought were maybe a bit of overkill) worked really well. some things i didn't really need &, of course, there were lessons that i learned for the next time.

things that were of great benefit:
- the heavy door mat outside the tent - i thought perhaps i was being silly taking it along, but it worked a treat for keeping mud out of the inside of the tent & gave us a relatively dry place to stand when putting shoes on or off.
- the oversized rain jacket for me & the hooded plastic poncho for smiley - they kept both of us pretty dry. smiley managed to get wet sometimes anyway, but that would have been from playing in the tubs of rainwater that i was collecting.
- gumboots - mine were knee high & awesome. smiley's were only calf high, so he managed to get water into his boots. you can't seem to buy really high gumboots for kids.
- huge tarpaulin - at first i thought maybe it was too much & i should have stuck with a smaller one, but especially with the car being parked underneath (i was using it to store most of our stuff), we had plenty of space to move around under it & remain dry.
- waist bag - i got myself a really cool waist bag (sort of like a bum bag /fanny pack but much nicer looking & with useful pockets) that stayed on my waist all the time. i carried in it a pocket knife, a zippo lighter, lip balm, insect bite remedy, mobile phone, palm handheld, map of the festival, car key, money & various ID cards & ATM cards. i also hung my water bottle off it & tied my sock poi around it so i could pull them out & practise whenever i had a chance.
- a 'floor' for the tent area - i used a super-sized picnic blanket with a plastic back placed plastic side up as a floor in our camp site. it gave us a relatively mud-free area to walk around in under the tarp. next year, though, i think i'll use another tarp for it instead cleaning the fabric side of the picnic blanket was a lot of hard work.

lessons learned for next time:
- park facing downhill - if i have to park at our camp site again, i'll park either facing downhill so i can roll out of the muck (we had to get towed out because we were bogged in the mud, like heaps of others there), or else find a place where i can park with at least two tyres on hard road. i plan to get us a much larger tent with two rooms, so i think that next year for woodford, i'll park the car at the camp site for long enough to drop all our gear at the tent & then take it away to park in the season campers parking area.
- get a roof rack - i had to swap cars with mum because i could barely see out of my little car with everything packed in there. a roof rack would help in a big way. at least most of the light stuff could go up there & i'd be able to see where i was driving.
- take only dry or tinned food - almost all of the fresh food i brought along i didn't use & it went off by the end of the eight nights. it took up heaps of room, too. i think next year i'll stick with dry, packet or tinned foods. the food preparation stuff i brought along to make some fresh food while i was there also took up heaps of room. considering i didn't use most of it, it was a waste of space in the car.
- small tarpaulins - the big tarp was awesome, but i found that i needed to string up some towels/picnic blankets to give some shade from the afternoon sun & also to act sort of like eaves on a house to stop things set up around the edge of the undercover area getting wet.
- more tables - i brought along three fold out table/stool things, but more table space would have been good. i used two of them almost constantly in the food preparation area, which then left only one to use where our chairs were set up. smiley was often drawing on that one, so that left no other table space to put anything on. i couldn't put anything on the ground since it was so wet.
- compression bags - the clothing took up too much space in the boxes i used to pack it (& other stuff) in. i might invest is some compression bags (such as these) so that i can take the space used down to a minimum. sheets & blankets could go in there, too. either that, or buy some sleeping bags & liners.
- leave the gigantic self-inflatable mattress - the mattress was great to sleep on, but my goodness me, what a pain in the bum to carry & pack away! you have to wrestle with the thing to roll it up again & it doesn't roll up all that small. i'm definitely going to buy us a good quality skinny self-inflatable mattress. if not, then even a blow-up mattress & a foot pump would be better than lugging that giant thing around.

over all, i'm really proud of myself for doing it all on my own. setting up & packing down the camp site took a really long time, but to have done it all on my own, including keeping smiley happy for nine days in between, i'm very happy with how well i did.

comment posted by Charm on January 5, 2008 11:22 PM:
this is a great post. i wondered how you would handle the trip on your own (i knew you'd be fine) and was looking forward to the posttrip posts

Compression bags - i have both types. the ones you make a vacuum with are great for plane trips but the ones you pull straps are fantastic for camping! i used them when i was travelling all the time.

food - it only took a month of living on dried or packet food when hiking in the US to realise just how amazing fresh food is, but that it has little to no place in hiking / camping. you can prepare food in advance that dont require cooking, such as trail mix, high protein muesli bars, dried fruit straps... and if you feel the need to cook meals use pasta'n'sauce or tinned food over a small stove. only make things that are single pot. you can use the pot as a bowl, smiley can have the lid... take sporks instead of a full set of cutlery, take a bag of apples and oranges... and grapes! grapes are great! high fibre means you might not need to use the bathrooms so often which i find to be a good thing when camping! so long as you eat prunes/licorice/cranberrys as well if you know what i mean

dry clothes / wet clothes - keep a set of clothes for wearing only in the tent. spread a sheet over the bedding during the day if you think you'll be in there in your dirty clothes... that way you dont mess up the bedding and you'll be in clean clothes and bedding at night.

the doormat was genius! i normally take a beach mat (one of those thin cane ones) so i can roll it out and sit on it when its dry outside... but if it rains they get gross! the doormat is a much better idea!

okay... i'm going to stop now i think i need to go camping!

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