Outdoor Camping Gear

You don't need much outdoor camping gear to have a great time sleeping out under canvas. All you need is a tent to protect you from the elements, some kind of pad or mattress to sleep on and a sleeping bag to make sure you stay warm at night. That modest shopping list wont break anybody's budget, and the camping equipment you buy should last you for numerous camping trips, and hopefully for years.

That takes care of sleep and shelter, but what about food and comfort for the inner man or woman? Well, just like the tent and the shelter, you can keep this simple and inexpensive, or you can make it awfully complicated and much more costly. Because there are companies manufacturing all kinds of amusing gadgets to sell to newbie campers. I know because I have bought quite a few of these camping toys over the years... things like flashlights with built-in transistor radios, and sometimes even with electronic sirens in the radio. Or really cheap and shoddy pocket knives that break really quickly.

Do yourself a big favor and buy a good quality folding knife, and a simple, functional flashlight or LED light. It only needs to do one function, but it has to be reliable. It is hard to find a replacement once you are miles from the nearest town or shopping center.

Food for camping is best kept simple, so the cook can enjoy camping and not be a slave to the kitchen. I mean, if you adore cooking and you think it is heaven to slave away feeding all the others in your group or family, then by all means do your thing. But if you want to enjoy the camping experience, you can make the meals more simple.

Breakfast can be oatmeal or cereal, baked beans from a can) on toast, and maybe a fried egg or two. Add fruit juice or milk, coffee, tea or hot chocolate (cocoa) and you have got that base covered. Then keep the lunch something light, like a sandwich or a tuna salad with a cordial drink (or just plain water). Then you can put a little creativity into the evening meal, even adding a soup or a dessert of some kind if it pleases you to do so.

It takes experience to cook successfully on a wood fire, and many campsites don't even allow them. So unless you have cooked on a camp cooking fire before, you are much better off planning to do your camp cooking on a two-burner propane gas stove. You can buy these quite cheaply from any outdoor camping gear supplier or even a K-Mart store. But the outdoor camping equipment specialist will have somebody knowledgeable there who can show you how the stove works and how to put it together properly. Some supermarket is not likely to be of much help, even if you can find anyone there to ask.

A few folding camp chairs are cheap to buy, and a table you can use to prepare food and eat from will make life at camp much more civilized. You can buy some amazing camp kitchen type folding tables if you really want to, but I consider them rather expensive for what they are. I prefer to improvise a little.

If you have to provide your own hot water to wash up the cooking pots and peoples plates after the meal, you can just have a large pot of water on the stove or fire. You can heat up the dish washing water while you are eating your meal, but do keep an eye on things so nothing boils over or anything.

You can buy a fancy propane-powered portable hot water heater for camping. These are rather pricey, but they can also be used to give you a hot shower when nothing else is available. If you need one and you have the dough, then buy it by all means. Otherwise it is just another piece of outdoor camping gear to be carted out to camp site and home again... Then it gets stored away and forgotten about until your next camping trip.