After Camping Report

I’ve had some time to process how our camping trip at the beginning of the month went. We were gone for six days, which is plenty of time to test things out. If you have everything you need for a week you can pretty much go indefinitely. You don’t bring enough food and laundry to last for months. On a long trip you do like you do at home: wash your clothes and do some food shopping. Repeat as needed.

For years we had our ambulance to camper conversion all dialed in. Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever. The old girl needed more work and money than I wanted to invest in it. With the price of gas the way it is we downsized to a Nissan Versa Note. It’s a tiny car. 

Even though it’s small it was large enough. We packed our big L. L. Bean Alpine 6 tent, air mattress sleeping bags, clothes, toys, chairs, a table, electronics, water, cooking gear, 2 stoves, optics, and a fair bit of food. It all fit with room left over. 

One of the clever things we did was to mount a 105 watt solar panel on the roof racks. The panel charged a group 27 deep discharge lead acid battery. The battery powered some 12 volt outlets and a 400 watt inverter. Our solar electric system took care of all our electrical needs. We even power a small cooler type compressor fridge.

The compressor types are much more efficient and work better than thermoelectric coolers. One of the things I always hated about camping was using ice and coolers. It seemed I was forever buying ice and often the food would get soggy. While my fridge is little no space is lost to ice. 

In the end we had everything we needed and quite a bit we could have done without. There was still room for more stuff. Even packed as we were, the car got a solid 35 mpg. It does help that we have the manual transmission rather than the crappy CVT automatic that was an option. 

All in all it was a great trip. I feel confident that we could easily travel for months with basically the same set up.

-Sixbears