Long term Vs short term camping

My lovely wife and I just came back from a weekend of camping. That was a fun thing to do for a few days. We also have gone camping for months at at time. So how does packing for long term differ from short term packing?

Not as much as you'd think. Start off by packing as if you'd been gone for a week or so. Make sure you have enough clothes for that amount of time. Have enough cleaning supplies to be able do laundry and dishes. Pack about a week's worth of food.

When you start running low on clean clothes, go to a laundromat. When your food starts to get low, go shopping. It's not that hard. Repeat as needed.

The thing is, most of us aren't going on a remote expedition. Even if you are camping in the middle of a National Forest, there's usually at least a small town nearby where the basics are available. In fact, a lot of camping areas have camp stores that carry some essential items. The selection may be poor and prices higher, but if it saves you a trip into town to buy something like bug spray, it's worth it.

Long term expedition camping is something else entirely. Packing for such trips require a lot more planning. Every ounce and inch of storage matters. Those trips are special cases. Even long range hikers like those on the Appalachian Trail don't pack that way. These days hikers pack light and plan on regular town stops.

Things are easier now than we first started camping. This past trip my lovely wife discovered she hadn't bought enough reading materials. We like to read in bed before going to sleep. No problem, she just downloaded a book onto the smart phone. I had dozens of books on my Kindle reader, so I was already set.

Of course, there's a lot more to long term camping than the actual camping. It takes some planning to make sure things are set back home before leaving. Then there's the normal “paperwork” of modern life: bills, banking, and business communication. Fortunately, all that stuff can either be simplified and/or dealt with using an Internet connection. That's a whole different blog post.

-Sixbears