Now that I've had to look up what a Smore is, and now that I'm going to admit to having a telescopic toasting fork, I think I should elaborate a bit:
I guess my beef with the car camping thing is based on an evaluation of what most people mean by it here. And here, it usually means exactly what I described above...a nasty blend of National Lampoons, a repulsive 70s Carry On film, and Gentleman's buddy movie where men are men and sheep are frightened. They are usually lead by an equivalent to that boating twonk that gets the little white hat and insists his wife call him skipper, only this time the ruddy cheeked heroes dump the hat probably because it is incongruous to the flip-flops and soccer regalia they usually come clad in. The illuminati amongst them can often be heard lamenting the demise of Sheffield knives, and how knives aren't the same as when he was a boy in the 40s/50s, when English knives rules the world [ha]. More often than not they are accompanied by a great slew of feral brats. At once they repulse me and amuse me. Fairly typically they make an annual pilgrimage to somewhere like that jungle that is the Hollands Wood campsite in the New Forest. And they set up camp in that majestic patch that is less than 100m from a major roadway. They need neither map nor compass as the RAC road atlas gets them where they want to be. [True story head honcho from the Hollands Wood site was on TV about a month ago 'cos it suddenly rained. Head count showed that within 3hrs of rain onset 66% of punters upped sticks and went home. He was grumbling 'cos he was out of pocket]. In my country car camping means exactly this, and it is the type that makes me puke. I know it doesn't have to be that way, but it is a bit like the do you like sport? question. When you know an affirmative answer is usually construed as enjoys parking his fat arse, getting drunk and farting, whilst watching some kind of ball game on the TV with his hand down his trousers, you know to always answer in the negative. But you know you've just sacrificed accuracy with your blunderbuss .
The whole camping thing is a can of worms to me. I get out quite a lot, and that's the reason I don't have the little BOB bag, or the X bag, just piles of stuff. I frequently go out to somewhere in the woods and decide to stay there a night or two and think nothing of it. It is so common that despite having camping type stuff with me the very notion that I have gone camping is absurd. Similarly, when my playmate and I get chance to see each other we often get out into the sticks, and we drive there. Recently she wanted to go find the bridge from Winnie The Pooh. We took a bunch of stuff including vodka and it turned into a jaunt of a couple of days. Despite having a heap of outdoor kit with us I just can't get my head round that being camping even though we slept under a basha and coated ourselves in DEET. We had too much other stuff with us that I would never take on a camping trip, like a jerry can full of water. Same deal when I took her to Watership Down.
Following along that theme, last year we rented a shooting / fishing lodge down in the west country, so I'm not necessarily about it's got handles, so you carry it. Similarly, when I still had the kayak, we'd drive down to a cottage to use as base camp. I had far to much gear to consider that camping. For one, lugging a sack of coal for the barbecue gets me kicked out of that club, but we'd radial off every couple of days from the base and into the undergrowth. Good fun, and I'll do it again, but I don't think of that as camping. Camping to me is when I've gone snail for a few days, no houses shops or sack bars, and when one appreciates the weight of water. Omnia mea mecum porto, and woe to he that forgot to bring his. Suffer it bitch.
Yup, I know car camping doesn't have to be bad, but a wise man once mumbled something about accuracy being sacrificed in order to be succinct, and now I've had to waffle on. I've seen pictures offered up on this very forum, from one of my favourite members, showing splendid episodes of car camping. I 'm pretty sure I even kept the pictures of his car. He's getting out there, and with the amount of firepower he took with him little wonder he needed transport. I was also delighted by the thread he posted in which he made a stove resplendent with chimney, for camping. So I'm not all about the life's not bloody hard enough, bring me more pain school of camping, I just despise the school of car camping that is as I described at the top of this post. It is ubiquitous and appears by far the most commonplace. On that, the author sacrifices those few good people to uphold the heuristic, and retain his status as a dedicated misanthrope leveling his antipathy at the many.
.
Damn, more gear!
. But, no tv with satellite dish and dvd, or rockstar rv/tourbus. Just the old fishing camp where you and your father/brother/uncle/cousin etc went for years, maybe you take your family now.
"