What! You sleep in your car?

I have loved tent camping for most of my life. While growing up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, our family would often travel "up north" to spend some time in the great outdoors - Minnesota, Canada, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and of course, Wisconsin (Illinois' largest state park).

My sister and I on a family trip in the early '80's

On one trip around Lake Superior, though (when I was about 8 years old), we were followed by a particularly pesky storm. It stalked us from Duluth, to International Falls, to Grand Marais, to Thunder Bay, and finally to Wawa, Ontario. In Wawa, we spent every morning in a laundromat, drying out our sleeping bags. We hadn't seen the sun for days. And then, on that one fateful morning, my parents had finally had enough. Across from our campsite, an elderly man with a wooden leg had to be rescued from his camper as paramedics helped him literally walk a plank to dry land.

The scene of the "plank rescue" in Wawa, Ontario

After the plank rescue, my dad packed up the tent, we checked into a hotel for the first time, and Dad sold the tent right there in our front yard as soon as we got home. Dad's attitude now is, "The world's worst hotel room is better than the world's best tent." As an adult, I disagree (we've been in some pretty horrific hotels through the years), but I understand the sentiment.

My sister and I under the Wawa goose (in the rain, yet again)

In my teens, one of my first purchases was a small tent from Montgomery Ward. I used it often, and it served me well into adulthood and young married life.

The Montgomery Ward tent has seen better days and currently serves as a "sacrificial tent" (more on that in a future post)

My wife grew up in Alaska and also has a history of tent camping. We upgraded and continued camping as a young family (until that one trip at the end of the Black River in the UP - a trip involving a run-in with a huge wolf, a lightning storm, a bobcat attacking a fellow camper's dogs in the night, and then the last straw, the Biblical plague-like swarming of biting flies in the outdoor shower). Wait! As an adult, I've come full-circle. To save the marriage, we chucked the tent on the way out of the wilderness and checked into a hotel in Ironwood, Michigan.

Back home, I got the urge to camp again after a few months, so I started researching equipment and settled on the Vertex-4, made by Alps Mountaineering (http://www.alpsmountaineering.com/). The kids and I would go bike camping a number of times over the next few years, I would do some solo bike camping on my own, and then I started tent camping on some of the trips I regularly take as a minister (various out-of-town lectures, speaking engagements, and so on). I also run a summer church camp near Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and for years I have spent that week in a tent (while the kids and nearly all of our staff sleep in cabins).

The "Director's Tent" at Beaver Creek Bible Camp near Eau Claire, Wisconsin (the one on the right)

Today's tents are so much better than even just a few years ago. To this day, I've survived some awesome storms, and I haven't yet had a leak of any kind. Oh, if we had only had some of this technology in Wawa! I've camped in snow and cold (on the raccoon superhighway near a dog track on the Mississippi River in Dubuque), I've camped in driving rain in the Rocky Mountains, I've camped in the scorching heat of southeast Utah, I've camped on soggy soil under a dam in Tennessee, but on some of those nights I started wondering: Yes, this is better than before, but is there a better way?

So the dream began: Yes, there must be a way to get up off the ground, while avoiding a motel, while enjoying the outdoors, while still avoiding the expense of a camper. And if it's just me traveling by myself, the solution is obvious: Sleep in the car!

Benefits of CAR-CAMPING as opposed to a HOTEL:

· No bed bugs (http://bedbugregistry.com/ gives me nightmares)
· Quiet (the forest is God's natural "introvert recovery zone")
· Nature is awesome
· Cheap (ranging from free to $20 or so vs. $100+ for a decent hotel)

Benefits of CAR-CAMPING as opposed to a TENT:

· Bed is off the ground
· Less likely to get eaten by a bear (or attacked by a human)
· More comfortable in harsh weather (wind, rain, snow, cold)

Benefits of CAR-CAMPING as opposed to a CAMPER or RV:

· Environmental (better gas mileage, as opposed to towing something)
· Less hassle (self-contained, maintaining one vehicle instead of two)

In future posts, I hope to share some of what I've learned after several years of experience camping in a vehicle.