Camping With Kids. Goldie Silverman
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Shall We Camp?
Eleven-year-old Sara camps with her father and younger sister in a four-person tent; sometimes, but not often, their mother goes with them. Susan, her husband, and their four kids camp in two small tents, a parents’ tent and a kids’ tent. Ever since her daughter was only 3 years old, single parent Janetta has been taking her camping, sometimes just the two of them, in a tent that sleeps five; it’s roomy enough to hold the play pen that was her daughter’s bed when she was small. Marlene, another single mom, and her two kids, 7 and 9, sleep in the back of their big SUV, with down pillows and comforters; they use their tent only for storage and for changing clothes.
Jeannie and Porter also began camping with their daughter when she was just a toddler, but they camped in a pop-up tent-trailer, which has a floor and a hard lid that pops up to form the roof over canvas walls. Henk Jr. and his wife and kids, 1 and 3, also camp in a pop-up tent-trailer, but when the kids go with their grandparents, Henk Sr. and Elke, they camp in an RV.
Ellen and her family are co-owners with her sister-in-law of a cab-over RV, a truck with living quarters that extend over the driver’s cab. They alternate camping weekends with the other family, and once every summer they negotiate for a longer trip. Ellen’s RV is “pretty much complete.” They leave it packed and ready to go all the time.
Meeghan, a 12-year-old student, hasn’t tried it yet, but she thinks an RV would be the best way to camp, because it would be more comfortable and easier to cook in than a tent and she wouldn’t have to go home if it rained.
So how will you camp? This chapter will help you decide, with detailed discussions of tents, RV camping, trailers, camper trucks, and vans. We’ll also cover renting, and, since I know I can’t answer all the questions you might have, a short segment on some good sources of further information.
Tents
My family camped in tents most of the time, especially on weekend jaunts. We liked tents because we could pretend that we were rugged outdoor people, getting close to nature, challenging ourselves to live without civilized amenities for just a few days. We slept in sleeping bags on thin mattresses and cooked outdoors on a gasoline stove. We carried water from a spigot in the campground, if there was one, or we pumped water through a filter from a lake or stream.
Although we tried to get along with a minimum of equipment, we often had too much gear for the trunk and the top of the car, so some of it rode with the kids in the back seat. That’s not unusual for tent campers. It made for cramped seating, and we tried to stop occasionally to let the kids get out in a safe place and run around. We learned early on that it’s important to load the car so that the tent can be taken out first and set up before we did anything else.
We now own several tents. The largest sleeps four close together, with no room for storage inside; when we use this tent, we leave our stove out on the picnic table all night, but most of our gear and our food stays locked in the car. I like this tent because I can stand up in it, and it has a little extension in the front where the dog can sleep. When the whole family camped, one of the kids spent the night by himself in a pup tent. Both tents must be pegged down in order to stay up.
Practice, practice, practice setting up your tent!
Our second tent is self-supporting, which means that we can set it up in an open area and then carry it to the place where we want it. Sometimes we are surrounded by brush, with only the door opening to a clear area. We can sleep two or three in this tent, but again, there is no room for storage. This tent stands alone, but once it’s in place we peg it down so the wind doesn’t blow it away.
Our smallest tent, a backpacker’s tent, sleeps only two, but we have to take turns sitting up. It’s hard to crawl into this tent and really difficult to change clothes inside. It has to be pegged down to be set up. It is a very lightweight tent, which is important when you’re backpacking.
All of our tents have rain flies, and we have added a clothesline inside from one point to the other, where we hang the clothes we take off at night. We also have a pocket sewn into one of the side seams, where we stash our glasses at night.
CHECKLIST
Questions to Ask When Choosing a Tent
Most tents are much larger than ours. Some of the largest have side rooms opening off the main room. Michael refers to his tent as a “condo.” It has three rooms, with curtains separating them. A tent with a peaked roof provides headroom so you can stand up and walk around inside. Dome-shaped tents come in all sizes. The largest have ample floor space, but you can stand up only in the center. Still, there is room enough inside for low camp cots if you don’t like sleeping on the ground, and there’s plenty of storage. Many dome-shaped tents are self-supporting. Some manufacturers advertise a “bathtub floor.” This means that the waterproofing on the floor of the tent extends up the sides several inches, keeping the tent floor drier in case of rain.
In the Northwest, where I live, most tents come with a rain fly, which is a cover over the tent with an air space between it and the tent roof. Rain and dew collect on the outside of the fly, and moisture exhaled by the people sleeping in the tent collects on the inside of the fly and not on the tent. Some campers carry extra tarps to use as dining flies, to protect their picnic table and cooking area from the dew and the rain. They tie the tarp to trees or to their tent or even to the car, if there’s no other place to tie it. If you’re camping in a dry, sunny area, you might want the extra fly to provide shade.
You will also see tents advertised as “three-season” or “four-season.” There is no national standard for designating seasonality to a tent, but in general, four-season tents have better protection against the elements, heavier coating on the floors, extra reinforcement around zippers and stress points, rain flies that extend farther beyond the tent, and better ventilation (to keep moisture from condensing inside). They are also more expensive. A family camping in the late spring, summer, or early autumn should not need a four-season tent.
If I were starting to tent camp all over again with my family, I’d buy a tent like the one I saw last summer when I was walking around a Forest Service campground talking to families with children. It had two rooms, an inner one and outer one. The outer room was screened on three sides. It had a zippered door to the outside, and another zippered door to the inner room. The outer room functioned as a mud room; it had a fabric floor where the two little boys were playing amid a stack of shoes. The inner room, the sleeping room, was kept relatively clean because all the shoes were left outside.
Tents with two rooms keep dirt outside.
We buy all of our tents on sale at the beginning of the season (last year’s model) or at an end-of-season clearance. Prices for tents vary considerably. A family tent, which can accommodate six to eight people, advertised in my latest REI sale catalog, is $260, reduced from $350. Campmor, a discount outfit that issues a popular