prepared for anything!

I came across this photo a while ago and boy did it set off a chain reaction of thoughts/memories. You see, recently we have been watching some bikepacking and backpacking videos on YouTube and I have been pondering the changes in gear since the days I first started camping.

Yeah…. when I started camping there were NO lightweight anythings. All our camping gear was heavy and cumbersome and most of it wasn’t really all that waterproof to boot.

And nowadays bikers seem to be able to carry enough “stuff” on a touring or gravel bike to live more or less comfortably for weeks, months on end.

Seeing this photo with the absurdly long shovel handle just. got me thinking about how some things change and other things don’t. Back in the day we liked to do our own baking while out on a camping trip — and yeah — that’s me as a little kid tending the fire in front of our campfire OVEN. Nowadays it seems bikepackers and hikers are content with dehydrated meals of all manner of different cuisines that I hadn’t even heard of when I was camping with my parents — but we ate well anyway. Just as do adventurers today. Just a different cooking style.

I was camping out of the back of an old station wagon, in the day….

There is no picture here, I thought I had one, but we used to carry a chuck-box — made out of 3/4” plywood so it weighed a ton before we put into it our cooking pots, silverware, mugs, and condiments. The thing was as wide as the back end of the station wagon and sometimes we dropped the door down and used the lid to cook a meal right on the back of the station wagon using a two burner Coleman gas stove about like this.

We had no lightweight gear — our tent in those days were heavy canvas, and while they purported to be “waterproof” there was always a spray of rain coming through in any kind of rain — even the lightest. Tent posts were heavy pine or oak, with a piece of steel pounded into them to stick through a grommet in the tent wall. And of course you had to carry the tent, the posts, the stakes — nice heavy steel ones – and of course a small mallet or sledgehammer to pound them into the ground. None of the conveniences of 2024!

In time we graduated to posher accommodations. About the t time we were getting married my parents bought a VW aftermarket camper. Not the European style COMBI but a built in the good old USA version like this.

Camping was a lot different then. The “good old days” I suppose. But then when I was a Boy Scout my friend’s father was a household mover and the only “sleeping bag” they could afford was made from a 1j950’s moving blanket. One time on a campout he pitched his tent right over a gully where water would run downhill and the next morning after a night’s rain the poor kid’s sleeping bag was so soaked — and so HEAVY — that it took two adult scoutmasters to load the wet sleeping bag onto the roof of the car for the trip home. No — definitely not Lightweight camping in those days.

The thing is — we didn’t know any better. There were no alternatives to the heavy weight gear we had, but we were determined to have a good time anyway — and we did. That VW took us a great many places and it took my parents a great many places too. And when we weren’t camping in it, we figured out the read hatch/door was large enough that we could move my spinet piano on it’s back down to Chicago where we were living in our second marital apartment. So hey, those were the days.

I’m not sure what the owner of the bike and the shovel needed to transport a shovel for. It will forever be a mystery to me. But I thank them for putting it online to spark good memories and happy thoughts.

I hope you’re well, I’ll try to chat again in a day or two. In the meantime take care o’ yourself.