HELPING HANDS
The Destination Game
To determine where you should camp, first figure out how many hours of driving your family can tolerate. Next, enlist your children’s help for this exercise: Using the distance key on the map, cut a piece of string that represents the distance you can travel from your hometown. Tie the string to a pencil. On a map of your state, pin the other end of the string over your hometown, and draw a circle as many hours away as your family can drive in one day. Your destination is somewhere in that circle. Look for the symbols for overnight camping.
First Camping Trips
After you decide on the number of hours your family can travel in one day, you can determine where you should go. Here is a simple trick to help you do this: First, get out a map of your state and, using the map’s scale, measure a piece of string that represents the distance on the map your family is willing to travel. Next, tie one end of the string to a pencil and, with your finger, pin the other end on the map on your hometown. Now pull the string taut with the pencil and draw a circle around your hometown.
EXPERT’S ADVICE
Two Rules for First-Timers
1. Don’t go too far from a town for your first effort, in case you forget something important.
2. Make your first trip short, even if you have a lot of time, until you get the hang of camping.
The circle’s radius—the length of the string—represents the distance your kids can tolerate in the car to your campground. In other words, if your kids can tolerate only four hours of driving, the string will equal four hours’ distance according to the scale of the map that you are using. Your destination is somewhere in that circle. Your older children can do the string test for you, and then look inside the circle for the little red tent or green tree that symbolizes overnight camping on the map.
You may be surprised to see how many opportunities for camping lie very close to your own home. I did a little test. I figured that a fussy child, or his parents, might not put up with more than one hour, or 50 miles, in a car. I drew a circle with a 50-mile radius from my home to see how many camping choices I have. Lots. Of course, lucky me, here in Seattle I can select from among saltwater beaches, freshwater lakes, lowland forests, or parks in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. I have a choice of county parks, state parks, or national forests. Three national parks are just a little more than one hour away. And my map doesn’t show private campgrounds, but in the yellow pages of my telephone book, I counted five entries for “Campgrounds” and 20 for “Recreational Vehicle Parks,” all within 50 miles of my home.
In the April 2004 issue of Parent Map, a monthly newsmagazine for Seattle-area parents, Hilary Benson describes her family’s first camping trip with sons ages 2 and 4. It was spent at a city-owned park in Seattle, only 10 minutes from home. They arrived at Camp Long in late afternoon, cooked and ate dinner outdoors, spent the night in sleeping bags in a cabin, breakfasted hastily the next morning, and left for home at 8:30 a.m. Fourteen hours altogether. A very good first campout.
Even if you have a whole week of vacation and not just a short weekend, for your first campout with small children you are better off planning a trip of only one or two nights until you get the hang of camping. A week may be too long for a first camping trip in a tent. Although a week in a motorhome or camper could be made bearable even if it rained every day, it wouldn’t be fun. If you have a whole week for vacation, take your two-day trip in the middle of the week when parks and facilities are less crowded, and do other things before and after.
Happy campers are those who follow the two rules for first-timers.
Don’t go too far from a town for your first effort, in case you forget something important. “Be close to a town that has food,” Julia, 12, advised. She may be like my grandchildren, who as young teenagers preferred fast food in town to camp cooking. Eight-year-old Eliot’s grandfather would agree on staying close to town; when we met the two of them in a US Forest Service camp outside of Seattle, he had forgotten one bag of their provisions and they had to drive back to go shopping.
My friend Barb told me about her family’s first camping trip, a backpack of one week when her children were 5, 6, and 7. The hiking turned out to be much too arduous for the kids, they did not have enough waterproof clothing, and the tarp they slept under leaked water through the sides. They had to dry their socks over an open fire and ration their food because they hadn’t packed enough. Nevertheless, they got through the week because, she said, her husband was so good and so patient with the children. And they weren’t turned off from camping, but after that first trip they bought a real tent and revised their expectations of what their kids could do.
Public Camping Choices
Eliot, 8, and his grandfather, and Barb and her family, were camping in very primitive situations. In Eliot’s Forest Service campground, the road was paved, but the pullouts for cars were gravel. The camping sites were spacious. There was one central pump for getting water, and there were outhouses scattered through the grounds. Barb’s campsites were even more primitive; the toilets were boxes hidden discreetly in the brush, and water had to be pumped from a stream.
Many campgrounds in national and state parks are just like the one where Eliot was camping. Other more developed parks have paved roads and paved pull-outs for parking cars or RVs. They sometimes, but not always, have bathrooms with flush toilets and coin-operated showers. The RV sites have connections to electricity and water, and some have sewer connections also. Many parks that don’t have sewer connections have a dumping station near the exit from the park. Some have pull-through sites so drivers won’t have to back their motorhomes or trailers out of their spaces. Some restrict the size of the RV to no longer than 25 feet. Those campgrounds that are run by governmental agencies—national, state, and county—usually are located close to some kind of natural attraction, like a lake, a river, or an area with lots of hiking.
Quick Quiz
Who Runs the Campgrounds?
Q: Which government agencies in your neighborhood might administer campgrounds?
A: National Park Service, US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, the state Park Service, the county Parks Department, or the city Parks Department.
Some people are surprised to find that even publicly owned campgrounds charge a daily fee. At Mt. Rainier National Park, which has five campgrounds, daily fees run from $8 to $15, depending on the park. Since they have no RV hook-ups, the cost is the same for tent or RV campers. The charge at Oregon State Parks runs from $13 to $18 per day for tent campsites during the high, summer season, and from $17 to $23 per day for full hook-ups. In addition, all campers in Oregon who make advance reservations pay a $6 nonrefundable reservation fee. At the Forest Service’s primitive campgrounds (those with wooden outhouses and a central water tap) on I-90, an hour’s drive from my house, the fee per day is $16 per campsite, but at remote campgrounds, miles of dirt roads away from highways, camping is free.
These fees are in addition to the fee that you pay when you enter the park, which may vary from park to park. If you take a grandparent with you when you camp at a national park or forest, you won’t have to pay an entry fee if Grandma or Grandpa has a Golden Age Passport. This lifetime permit for anyone 62 or older gets
