Our Camping Tips & Hacks

all right welcome back to Rob's crush we're working today I'm just gonna talk a little bit about camping hacks now you know if you're gonna go to a campground or whatever and you're gonna camp in and a tent or a trailer I've got a few hacks that you might be interested in camping less so this one is a camping clothes list you know pants pajamas we have this you just make one up on your computer on Microsoft Excel or whatever and then every time you go camping you print one of these off and then you don't have to think oh did I get everything for camping because you'll know because it's on the list and if for example you're camping and you say oh damn I wish I had this just add it to your sheet when you go home plug that into your computer and add it for later another thing we have here is another camping list this one's far more extensive section two so food equipment kids personal adult and dog all right an indispensable tool I find for camping is Swiss Army knife you've got your corkscrew you've got you know knife blades can open our scissors toothpick some food hacks take kind of you know you don't want to start off when you're out there you don't want to be hungry but take just what you need so like this Rubbermaid container here I have sugar in it so I would take just enough sugar for my coffee with you know your coffee you can bring coffee and a botom which is really great but I've just gone to like the instant coffee so I get this Taster's Choice instant coffee I find the tasters choice is my personal preference I like that the best egg holders so you can get one of these fancy egg holders you can get one that holds six you can get one that holds 12 another thing that you can do it's pretty neat I've seen it on the internet I haven't actually done it because we don't really we've never needed it but you can take a water bottle and what you do is you crack your egg you open it up and we put it in the bowl and you squish your water bottle and you put it in there and then you expand the water bottle as you have it up to the egg in the ball and it'll actually suck the whole egg into the water bottle and you can fit like four or five eggs in a water bottle and if you wanted to if you're gonna make french toast for example you could put the milk in like you could whip it all up put the milk in it and put all that into the water bottle and then put a lid on it and take it camping with you and then you're all ready for your french toast or your scrambled eggs whatever you're having right now the thing that we do has let's say you have some you know some vegetables there's peaches and cream whole kernel corn or some beans to go with one of your meals you can open these up and you can actually heat them up in the barbecue so you can just heat them in the can you don't have to bake this stuff you don't have to cook it for long you're just warming it up so because of that you can just open the can up and then heat it up in your barbecue that's quite often what happens with us so you don't have to dirty another pot or whatever or if you don't have a pot you can just cook it and they can so again with size savings you can get like small containers of cream another thing you can take which pretty cool are these noir sidekicks they have a variety of flavors they have rice too so you could get like this one is Mexican rice which is cool and then you've got a variety of different past ones like this one is sour cream and chive and there's you know a variety anyway pretty good just little add-ons they just boil them in water and then add the sauce to it and you're good Ziploc bags these Ziploc bags really handy for when you are you have leftover food for example or after you open your bacon you can't put it back into the cooler because you know it'll get all wet with all the ice and all the water that's in your cooler so you can package it in one of these Ziploc bags that keeps dry and also if you have any leftover food you can put that like your leftover hamburgers or hot dogs can go on a ziploc bag the kids want to reheat it later alright so one of the things that we we noticed when we had kids we had baby wipes all the time and then we went camping without them and we really missed them turns out we use baby wipes for all sorts of things and they're really great because your hands are usually dirty when you're camping and when you're cooking and all the stuff you have to clean your hands all the time so I find you know we get a package of baby wipes before we go camping for the season and graham cracker cookies so these are the Cadillac of s'mores so to speak these ones will give you a better tasting s'more it won't be any cleaner I'll tell you that and baby wipes right baby wipes so but the kids will love this stuff and they're a little bit smaller and they're in a nice package you don't have to worry about the nice part about these too is when you go camping you open a box like graham crackers or whatever and they get more like the yet damp in the weather and then they don't taste good they're kind of soggy and gross so these will are coated in a protective layer of chocolate so they don't go gross on you so a good value here just keep them out of the Sun keep them somewhere cool if you can so keep your cooler cold you can marinade your meat and freeze it and one of these Ziploc bags if you're taking bacon there's some peameal bacon here freeze it and then that will keep your cooler cooler longer so you can bring water with you with one of these containers another way to bring water it's kind of a neat way is to have like an old pop bottle or whatever make sure it's clean fill it with water and not quite to the top leave a little room for expansion and contraction and stuff freeze it so you've got this giant block of ice and as this starts to melt you can actually take the water out of it pour the water out and you can drink that water or use it for to make your coffee or whatever so there's another idea if you have enough room when you're camping for two coolers it's really great you can keep all your beverages in one like that's not gonna spoil like beer pop juice box and stuff like that in the one and you don't have to worry about that because people are in and out of that one all the time and it doesn't hold as much ice your other one you can pack all your food in it and then people are in and out of it less so it keeps it longer the other thing that you could do is pre freeze your food like if you're gonna take pork chops with you put them in a marinade put them in a ziplock bag and freeze them now and the Rubbermaid container I have my dishes and I have my dishes all stacked nice and neat in here so I have some dish soap you can get biodegradable dish soap and just you know if you have one of these like this is a sunlight one so this isn't the same soap that's what's inside you get one of these little ones right and then you can reuse the bottle all the time and you get your fancy biodegradable dish soap for camping a couple of bigger plates I've got two four six small plates like medium sized plates I've got a couple of these metal wine glasses because we're always camping on our anniversary with the kids loss of these cups now these are like a plasticy sort of top I'm not sure what they're made of these are from world famous same with the plates same idea so they resemble the old tin plates that you get and then I have my pot inside the pot I have bowls so that all fits nicely together you just fit it inside the pot you have lid and then I have all my cutlery inside there's another container now this is like this is like a dishwashing container so what we'll do is we'll put soap and water in this and it will wash our dishes and then dry them on the table okay then I also have a small cutting board I have an egg lifter flipper and then a bigger cutting knife for chopping and whatnot so then this all fits nice and neat and this tote and that way you're always ready for camping so everything that you have is is ready to go so I have a separate set of camping dishes camping silverware or cutlery and it's all ready to go all right another thing I have is this frying pan or a griddle if you like to call it that and then a flat surface on the front and it has this little spot for excess fat to run off to so I find that this works really good on the barbecue so the Weber Q barbecue that I have is the smallest one and I set that inside here and the handles just kind of stick out you close the lid right when you're cooking because it doesn't get hot enough without the lid closed it just takes too long so close the lid do your cooking open it up do what you got to do flip your eggs flip your pancakes whip your bacon that sort of thing and close the lid back up keep the heat in it cooks it faster it works really really well I really love that set up now another thing that we'll all do is that if there's only one picnic table I'll use this as a table and I'll have say my barbecue here with my frying pan on it and I'll be making my bacon eggs or pancakes or whatever for the kids and then at the picnic table behind me I'll have my Coleman stove set up and I can have a pot of water on for some coffee or whatnot and then you work in between the two stations it's really easy that leaves the rest of your table for eating space so why do I use the totes totes keep everything safe and dry it's easy to pack and if I take the totes and put them on the front of my trailer frees up room inside the CRV so inside we have and this one we have a gas line just in case you want to use a propane tank a full-size tank I usually have these small propane cylinders which are now recyclable so I use those now I wrap them in oven mitts to protect them from being banged around inside here we have a Weber Q barbecue and some marshmallow roasting sticks a couple of axes because the kids like to cut what at the same time and that's it for total number one so in my second tote I have a couple of tarps for emergencies when it's really raining I have my Coleman stove and that fits nicely on top of this other tote and this is a Rubbermaid tote Coleman stove sits in the inset space here and inside this one is my dishes camping dishes then I have room for more propane cylinders and a tablecloth set so your tablecloth and your bench cloths and then all little metal holders for that so it all fits in this tote all right so one of the first things I did when I got this trailer is I took off the propane tank in the front because I don't cook inside the trailer if you camp anywhere where there's bears and cougars and things like that you can't eat in your trailer because the Bears and the other animals will come right in through the tent part of your tent trailer so if you've got a hard sided trailer no problem you can cook and stuff inside of that but since I'm camping in the tent trailer I can't so I removed the propane tank and I had my neighbor weld on this just basically shelf onto the front of my trailer here and on that I put these plastic bins so since I welded the shelf on I can put two of these bins on and then bungee cord them down and then they can't move it gives me more space to carry stuff and it gives me extra tongue weight because I needed some extra weight because the trailer was back heavy so on this one is I have these bike racks and you'll notice that there's a big gap in between the bike racks so there's two really tight together and then there's the big gap and two more really tight together so the two bike racks are just inset enough so that the handlebars of the bikes don't stick out too far past the trailer and you have one facing frontwards and one facing backwards so that your bikes can fit tight together now the gap in the middle what you can do is you could put two kayaks on there you can put kayak holders on there we have a double kayak so we put just one single double kayak down the middle quite frequently Wow or a paddle board it'll fit a paddleboard nicely in that space and then on top of the CRV that I have I have roof racks so if I take the four bikes and the kayaks on my trailer that I can put on top of my roof racks on the CRV I could put the paddleboard and it does increase a lot of wind resistance when you're biking at the campsite obviously you want to bring a couple of locks um this one is a keyed lock there's a lot of really nice new ones out that are like a combination lock either with letters or numbers it doesn't matter they're quite nice and useful especially with the kids and another thing is there's these bike bags that you can get and make sure you get a bike bag that's big enough to fit your phone in so I've got an iPhone plus here and I had to get a bigger bag and this one just you can mount it right on your handlebars it's velcro and it has a zipper and a carrying handle if you need it if you need to take it off I just take everything out when I go places but when I'm riding I need to put my stuff somewhere out of my pockets so it doesn't fall it that's what the bike bags good for there's a couple of different kinds there's like a CCM bag so we have a couple of these ones so people can put them on different bikes and stuff another thing I find handy to put out your fire at the end of the night you need to bring over buckets full of water so I get a bigger bucket like either a cleaning bucket from your mop at home or this is a drywall bucket that I like because they're stackable so you can get a couple of these go over fill them up with water bring it back to your campsite and at the end of the night when you know you're done with your fire you dump a couple of these on your fires out all right another thing that's kind of cool is kids sand toys you can get these plastic buckets everybody's got one of these things from like Toys R Us or whatever and sometimes there's like little things you can make little starfish or whatever out of them Michael just these little molds and these buckets tend not to last very long and the shovels don't last very long so that was that princess otto princess otto has a lot of uh a lot of surplus items and stuff so I have these really nice steel buckets these stainless steel buckets and so I got three of these to take camping for the kids and then if you go to the gardening center you get these really tough plastic shovels and your kids probably won't be able to break these believe me my kids have tried over the years okay sometimes when you're at the campsite you just need some time to relax because your kids have worn you out some of the things you get I bought this washer toss game this is a nice little thing this is rec tech there's another rec tech product it is a easy set up badminton net and you'll notice that there's no guy wires or anything with this it's just almost like a bow so you make your base and then you put this bow in it you put the net on it and all Holtz Aneta it's really amazing so stuff like that and then of course for rainy days he might want to bring a deck of cards a couple of games the kids you know crayons and coloring books mad libs em ADL IBS if you have a chance those are fun for the little bit older kids and you know you anyway you know look them up they're pretty cool there are a lot of fun one you're driving to so if you've got a four-hour drive to get to your campground you're breaking up the mad libs and everybody puts in a noun or pronoun or a verb and you know you make a silly story and it's a lot of fun all right we also have these storage bins now this is a three drawer storage bin and it's not super big but it'll hold your clothes for camping for a couple of days and if you pack really well maybe longer so what we do is because we're in a tent trailer we don't have drawers or anything in the tent trailer that are like that we take two of these and everybody gets drawer so there's four kids in my family so there's six of us total so these work out good because there's three drawers each so two of them everybody gets drawer and that's where you keep your clothes for camping and then we'll put like a laundry basket in for all your dirty clothes throw them in the laundry basket and that'll just sit on to the table or something all right another thing that we bring camping with us now is this Ryobi battery-powered fan it is a hybrid so if you do camp on electrical sites you can run an extension cord to it in our tent trailer we never camp on electrical sites so we use the battery and that battery lasts us you know two nights on low no problem and it just helps to circulate some of the air through especially on those really really hot days and sometimes just the noise helps you to sleep too just another thing that we do in our trailer is that we pre pack our chairs and things so we actually have dedicated camping chairs that always stay in our trailer so we have enough for us and a couple of guests and we carry things like actually right here this is a retractable clothesline which is kind of handy and then we have her buckets got a fire extinguisher some rope some frisbees that I bought this year also to go along with the buckets I was showing you before I got these really big shovels so they're pretty big for kids to play with so they're fun anyway and then we carry some more rope we always have duct tape so duct tape you'll see especially on these older your tent trailers if your zipper let's go or there's a little gap and bugs come in right so you put some duct tape there and then you don't have any problems we carry you know just a little broom little dustpan and then stuff for the dog like the dog's bowl and dog chain it's a really good thing to start your fires with is like these 2x4 offcuts you can get some of these and just try to make some really thin slices until you had it not all right you want really thin pieces to light so come down shave off some other pieces another thing to start the fire I use obviously paper and you can take your logs like this and there's a couple of different ways that you start fires and a lot of people do what's called the the teepee where you put all your logs up on an angle like this up like that and then there's another way called the log cabin and I like the log cabin because it gives you the biggest most flames of your fire and it burns a nice long time so we're gonna set that up you can see over here on the side it's starting to catch it takes a little bit of time but it'll catch and if you have like a lid from one of your bins you can fan it and that'll help to speed up the process and if you're really bad with fires or your wood is like really wet and you left it out all night there's also lighter fluid so you can use these this is for BBQ briquettes but if you're really bad you know open that up give it a little shot and that'll help you alright so now you can see why I like the log cabin you get a lot of flame out of it so anyway after quite a few years of camping with the family those are the hacks basically that I found effective having your lists and pre-packing a lot of things and having all extra stuff that you need for camping in your trailer or in bins packed up and ready to go that's like for example if you have your tent and maybe your dishes or your barbecue all packed up in one bin and you just pick it up and off you go right so my best time I think going camping was in under an hour I think I packed everything that we needed up hide the trailer set hooked up to the the vehicle and off we went so anyway if preparation is really the key so get everything ready in advance and then the day that you leave you're not running around like an idiot alright anyway thanks for watching and have a great time camping

Channel: Rob's Garage Woodworking

Views: 39,100

Rating: 4.8866143 out of 5

Keywords: iMovie, camping, hacks, tips, camping hacks, camping tips, robsgaragewoodworking, ontario parks, parks canada, camping ideas, organized camping, camping organization, trailer camping, tent camping, tent trailer, wilds, wilderness, camping canada, ontario camping, great white north, oh canada, canadian tire

Id: JGJnqOPdNDI

Length: 23min 26sec (1406 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 19 2019