Why I Gave Away My Camping Stuff

Wide awake and exhausted, I opened the notes app on my phone at 3 in the morning in the Appalachian Mountains to start a document I affectionately titled, “Fuck Camping.” It was the 4th consecutive day of biking, and the first that involved bigger climbs as I got into the mountains. I had been kept up late by the sounds of campers who didn’t much care for the quiet hours of the campground, and then somewhere around 2 a.m. I was woken up by my bladder, and worse, the cold. Shivering and unable to sleep (I would doze for another 20 minutes or so sometime around 4), I started to jot down all the reasons I wanted to ditch camping entirely.

With a couple days of rest and food between me and those thoughts, they still make sense. So today I gave my camping equipment to a hostess at Ed’s Steakhouse in Bedford, PA. Here’s why!

They should add “good chocolate cake” to this sign.

The Fucking Weight

Between my tent, sleeping bag, foot-pump air mattress, and a few other odds and ends, ditching camping means I can jettison about 8 pounds from my bike, which is somewhere between 20-25% of the gear I’m carrying. That’s 8 extra pounds I don’t have to carry up these fucking mountains anymore, 8 extra pounds my muscles, joints, tendons, and ligaments don’t have to deal with for the next 3200ish miles.

In the world of bike/backpacking, less weight = more money. Trading a tent for hotels is pretty much the epitome of this.

Camping is More Expensive Than I Thought (While Hotels are Cheaper)

One of the reasons I planned on camping so much was because I thought it was going to be exponentially cheaper than staying at motels, hotels, and Airbnbs. Then I rolled up to a campground in Gettysburg that wanted to charge me $70 to pitch my tent for the night. I kindly declined and booked a nearby hotel room for $62, where I got to sleep in a comfy bed in a room all to myself.

Even public campgrounds charge over $30 (with a surcharge for being an out-of-state resident). With apps like Priceline and Bookings.com matching travelers to last-minute hotel deals, I can (so far) pretty reliably get a hotel room in the $60 range, (ditto with airbnb) which is about half what I was expecting hotels to cost. (Granted, these are 2/2.5 star hotels, which is about your basic Super 8 experience).

Basically, I was expecting hotel rooms to be about 5-6 times as expensive as camping, when in reality they are about twice the price.

Granted, if I was stealth camping (camping for free, sometimes legally, sometimes not), the price difference would be much more significant, but the stress of that would just combine with…

Camping Sucks Up So Much Time and Productivity

The bottom line is that setting up and breaking down camp is time not spent on board game stuff. All the writing, filming, editing, and designing I’d like to be doing just isn’t happening. Compounded in all this is the fact that campsites aren’t exactly conducive to laptop work: while you can find campsites with power (for an extra fee!) Wi-Fi isn’t exactly sprouting from trees. Days spent at the campsite are days not spent on the entire purpose of the trip!

The Aches and Pains

Camping after a long day of biking makes me fucking miserable. I can’t sleep, my muscles are tight, and between my sleeping bag and tiny air mattress I’m getting a sense of what coffin living will be like. If you want to experience misery, try getting a massive leg cramp while contorting yourself out of your tent at 2 a.m. because you have to take a leak. I need legitimate rest after a long day of biking, and I’m not getting that through camping. More power to the people that do (I’m looking at Ryan Van Duzer specifically here, who has inspired me to do a lot of this biking stuff in the first place).

Loneliness

Really cool space, but not a single person on this entire campground all night.

My loneliest nights have been camping nights. Forget about the night I spent on a campground with literally no other human being in the entire place (not even a ranger or camp host). Factoring that night out, it’s still pretty clear that campgrounds are primarily filled with families and groups who are doing their own things. I’ve had a few conversations with people on these campgrounds, but I’m just a weirdo on a bike by myself.

At least in a hotel I have access to the surrounding community. Hotel staff and waitstaff are cool about pointing out local places to check out, and bars are natural gathering places.

Granted, campgrounds are filled with friendly people who are willing to point out cool places to hike to, but…

At the End of the Day I’ve Kind of Had Enough Nature

I’m outside riding my bike for an average of 50 miles a day. I’ve seen some beautiful landscapes and wildlife, felt the sunshine on my neck, welcomed the wind in my face, and smelled all the grass (and sometimes manure) that goes with it. And I love it!

But after a long day of that, I could use the comforts of a bed, sheets, air conditioning, and some electronics.

So while this feels a bit like giving up, it’s really just making this trip work better for me. I’ll save some wear and tear on my body, experience more board game stuff, and have more fun!

They say that people bike across the country in many different ways. Some travel in large groups with a professional guide and a van that carries all of their gear for them, and others go solo and stealth camp the entire way. So I’m just choosing the journey that works for me, and figuring things out as I go. I’m going to look into trying out Warmshowers (a community of bicycle enthusiasts who open up their homes to travelers like me) and possibly do some Couchsurfing.

Either way, I’ll see you in Seattle.