tent

Camping with kids

Yeay! Our first time camping with kids was a success, otherwise it would put us off for another five years at least. Why exactly did it work out? The overwhelmingly more than positive outcome of our trip wasn’t pure luck, if that’s what you are thinking. From what I’ve gathered this is what you need to pull it off. Call it my words of wisdom and trust me I am happy to share:

tent

  • A tent you can set up in like immediately.  You can’t have your kids abandoning all hope of ever being able to sleep in there and at the same time losing their naive faith in you (and that will be gone either way soon enough). For all those reasons, we love our Quechua tent. You pop it out of the bag and voilà the tent is up. Of course putting it in the bag is as simple but only if you have the video instructions at hand and can view them like ten times.
  • A great camp. Not so easy but manageable. We enjoyed the Burgstaller camp in Austria. Terrific location next to a lake with a lovely sandy beach. Clean facilities, especially made for kids to enjoy. Well, you can see the photos to be sure.

My trick in finding a perfect camp – the Dutch. If the camp is full of the Dutch I know it will be great, meaning it will be quiet enough to get some sleep.

  • Great camp along with the Dutch ( and I do mean this in the best possible way) has also great spots to set up a tent. Well, this camp has them, still we managed to get a spot with absolutely no shade and it was the only downside of the whole adventure.

2013-07-28 11.36.39

  • The right equipment. Now this is really a broad topic, because if you look at all the neighbors in the camp, they all have way more cool camping stuff than you do. And it’s no use sweating about it.

2013-07-28 11.51.04

  • Break from the routine. I love the routine. I try to stick to it and am very agitated when I have to let go and abandon set ways. Well, when going to a camp, you obviously can’t put your kids to bed at seven and then run around yelling and explaining people to keep it down. And you want your kids to be as tired as possible so there are no two am surprises. For the first time since having kids we stayed at the beach till seven, we had dinner at eight and managed to get into bed by somewhere around nine thirty. It could have been sooner or later because from seven on I have stopped checking the clock and just went with the flow.

2013-07-28 07.45.44

  • Favorite food. We let the girls eat whatever they wanted. I still managed to sneak through some fruit but basically the diner was fries, chicken nuggets and a piece of my pizza. The break from the routine and really I saw no point in trying to make them eat something that would eventually end up on the plate and them going to bed hungry waking up at twoish demanding to be fed.

And that’s all there is to it. Now enjoy our photos, here is the map to get you to our destination and the address to the camp: http://www.burgstaller.co.at/.

2 thoughts on “Camping with kids

  1. Camping with kids is an overwhelmingly challenging and exciting family adventure. I’ve never experienced camping with my family when I was a kid but managed to join every Girl Scout encampment in and out of the school and it was full of fun and happy memories. For sure your kids will always remember this family activity when they become grow ups. – Juliet of 4-insure blog

Tell me what you think...