A Scrappy Girl's Guide to Camping

We go on a lot of camping trips. I won't call us super hard-core, since we're usually not gone for more than 2-3 nights, and we are typically not more than a couple miles to the nearest chain restaurant or grocery store, but still. My dad likes to call what we do "car-camping," meaning no, we did not trek all our equipment and supplies into the camp site, we drove them there, and our cars are ready to go when we need to dash out for more supplies. 

There is plenty we spend way too much money on when we're camping (i.e. food and drinks - but hey, it's cheaper than eating out!) but I definitely have established my own scrappy hacks for how to save money everywhere else. First off is our tent: it's massive, technically sleeps 12, and gives our family of 4 + dog extensive room. Purchased new, this would have felt kind of silly, but guess what? People are constantly realizing that they actually don't use those tents they purchased and so there are ALWAYS tents being sold secondhand. We got ours on Facebook Marketplace for $115 and the kicker is it HADN'T EVEN BEEN OPENED. 

The camping qualm that may irritate me most is keeping food cold and not soggy. I also absolutely despise purchasing bags of ice. I know they are cheap, but it just drives me crazy to have to purchase them EVERY time we go camping, and then replenish them daily since it melts so fast. Also, I don't love for our food containers to sit in pools of water, so I have trained myself to prepare ahead of time and freeze gallons of water (which I usually purchase for our first camping trip and reuse through the summer until our last camping trip).

These giant blocks of ice keep the cooler cold, don't melt for several days, and don't result in water all over the cooler. Plus, you can drink the water as it melts, should you want/need to. I also have some freezer packs that come in those delivery meal kits that work perfectly in food coolers. (No, I never purchase these, for the record, but enough people have given me free coupons to try them out that I now have a bunch of the cold packs which I OBVIOUSLY am not throwing away or "recycling" as they suggest.) The trick with these is to freeze them flat ahead of time so that they fit perfectly in the cooler and you're not finagling with a rock solid odd shape that just takes up more room. Also, I do typically wrap them in a plastic grocery bag so that if they should leak, nothing gets on the food. 

While I've got you absolutely ENTHRALLED with ice and water vessels, I'll also share my tip of purchasing a spouted water jug at the beginning of the summer which we use to fill our cups, and refill throughout the summer. I know there are ones that you can purchase that are actually reusable, made of silicone or plastic, and this may be my next purchase. But until then, I figure I can justify reusing the $3.99 one all summer.

These next two are really scrappy, even for me, but I can't help myself. Yes, I keep every napkin ever given to me that I don't end up using - Dunkin Donuts, wrapped around those packs of utensils when you get food to go, left over from one of my kid's birthday parties...yep, all those napkins end up in a bag, which comes camping with us to clean up spills or marshmallows or whatever.

Same goes for any sort of plastic bag we've got hanging around. For someone who doesn't buy Ziplocs, I sure feel like I end up with a lot of them. People are often giving us things in Ziploc bags and I keep all of them to bring camping.

They come in very useful for leftover food (which I just can't bear to waste) and can just be tossed back into the cooler. Yes, I made Dave hold up the bag with leftover food in it so I could take a picture to prove this point:

So, my next mission is to figure out a way to really utilize all these cooler bags that we had hanging around...I brought a few camping and we put drinks in them, which kept them decently cold, but it wasn't a perfect system. I saw somewhere that you can make a cooler cover out of them which extends the coldness of your cooler even longer, so I'm thinking that will be my next project. 'Til then - happy camping!

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