This year I’ve been working on improving our camp setup, which I guess mostly means spending money on new things… For the past few years we’ve been camping in a 4 person tent with our 2 kids and dog. Our gear takes up LOTS of space in the car (with a roof box) and our tent was way too small for all of us.
At the beginning of the season we decided to replace our tent. We got a Big Agnes Bunk House 8 (8!!!) from Out and Back Outdoors. I hadn’t heard of this website before, but it basically resells returned products and for all we could tell the tent was never used or opened and we got it for 50% off. Good deal. The tent has a divider “wall” (sheet) in the center that basically splits it up into two tents that are the size of our older 4 person tent. This is great for giving us our own space.
Then I focused on consolidating space. We had 4 tote bags of gear that I dug through and reduced down to 2. One of these contains our kitchen supplies - plates, pots, utensils, etc… The other bag has everything else - hammock, camp fuel, lights, matches, a battery pack, etc… I’d still like to find a good bin to replace the tote bags with, but this is working well for now.
Then we did some more shopping. Our camp stove took up a lot of space and is quite old, so we picked up a Jetboil Genesis. This is a two burner stove that folds in half. It’s got way more control over the burners than our old stove and takes up much less space. We also have a Yeti Tundra 50 cooler which is also…. big. Our dog shares the trunk with it and I don’t think he appreciates that it fills half the trunk. I just ordered an Oyster cooler. It’s pretty pricey but is basically a thermos with thinner vacuum walls compared to the foam insulated Yeti. It has a smaller overall capacity, but claims that you don’t need to add additional ice (apart from the ice packs). Ice takes up about half the space of our Yeti and adds a ton of weight - so I’m looking forward to testing this out.
So that’s that. As I mentioned, we still want to find a new bin for our supplies to replace the 2 tote bags, but we’re really happy with the current setup. It’s about as minimal as we can get and everything has its place.