Easy simple travel – camping

With Covid changing the rules all the time, we turned to camping during the holidays. Jay and I love camping and have camped in many different places since 2013. While camping is quite fun, there are many pros and cons thos this kind of traveling –

Pros

1. Cheap accommodation – Lets face it we are all camping to save money on accommodation. Since we’ve got Jack (our spoilt labrador) camping is on top of our list so we are not spending a whole lot of money on accommodations that are pet friendly.
2. Can be planned at a short notice – Some campsites dont need bookings and you can just turn up. But many do, especially during the peak season.
3. Flexibility – Camping is fairly flexible, allows you to stay one day at a spot and drive onto the next one without much hassle.
4. Make friends – I find that people at campsites are a lot more friendly, communicative, and laid back,than in hotels. We’ve met some incredible people on their travels and had great chats with them on the way.
5. Time away from technology – I find that camping resets my clock. We wake up with the light naturally and go to bed once its dark. I tend not to use my phone much and also no TV so no screen time. I like the distance from screens for a few days really makes you be more present.

Cons –

1. Packing and unpacking – we’ve been trying to spend more days at one location, rather than camp one night at one place and move on to the next. It can take some time to pack and unpack everytime.
2. Subject to weather conditions and seasons- Most days are fine but if you do end up getting bad weather, rain, camping quickly becomes not fun at all. And ofcourse you are kinda limited to summer, not that you cant camp in winter if you are up for it.

Over the holidays we camped at Mallacoota, VIC. It was a 4 hour drive from Canberra. A very scenic drive at that. It is a very small town on the northern coastline of Victoria. Just gorgeous beaches. We went to Quarry beach, and Secret beach almost everyday. They were both pet friendly and beautiful. They had some great cafes, local pub, and restaurants in the town.

If you are new to camping, would start with closer to home short trips. and then extend them out slowly. Every trip you learn something new and then you add it to your next trip.

For organizing all our things in the sedan that we have, we used some foldable crates we got from Bunnings. We used about three of these. They were so useful in organizing our food, cleaning supplies, Jack’s food and toys.

We have a couple more trips planned coming up soon. Do you guys like camping? Share your ideas, campsites with us and we may try it next time.