We’ve talked for a while now about getting a tent and trying out camping. Three things have put me off the idea in recent years:

1. No places that we’d really like to camp – This was rectified as soon as we moved to Canada and now there is no shortage of places that we’d like to go.
2. No shower – this bothers me mainly because of my hair. I’m not at all vain, but my hair gets very greasy after 24 hours and so it needs to be washed every day. It also gets extremely messy and sticky outy after a night’s sleep which I can’t combat without water and a brush. My hair also looks terrible if I leave it to dry naturally. All those things add up to the fact that if I go camping for a couple of days I am guaranteed to look a lot rougher than everybody else who has camped with me and that has always made me wary. However, I think this could be rectified by the use of a good hat.
3. I am a very light sleeper - I find it hard to get comfortable even in a bed (my SO mentions the words “princess” and “pea” in a sentence together fairly often). I also frequently have to use earplugs to block out noises. I’m not sure it is a good idea to use earplugs while camping since it might be useful to hear the bear coming to ransack my tent. As for the comfort factor – I sometimes find a contained space, such as a sofa, more comfortable than a bed so, who knows, maybe a camp bed will turn out to be blissful for me.

I was out for a walk with my friend the other day when she received an email on her blackberry from my SO. It said something along the lines of “I have been doing some home improvements and have built a new room for our apartment!”. I hurried home to see what on earth he was talking about and found him sitting in a tent that he had erected in our living room.

He had seen a deal for a tent, two sleeping bags and a cooler bag for $100 at Sears so he couldn’t pass it by. It’s not the tent of choice for any proper backcountry expeditions but it’ll do as a starter tent for summer camping fun at Provincial Campsites. We spent most of the rest of the night sitting in it, listening to the Internet radio and thinking about where we’d test it out first.

Garibaldi Provincial Park seemed to be on the top of the list and the Black Tusk area of the park looks fabulous to me (although the Diamond Head area also looks good and is closer to Vancouver).

However, all the Garibaldi campsites are backcountry so we’ll probably give Alice Lake Park a go first just to test out the tent. We snowshoed around the Four Lakes trail in January and walked across one of the frozen lakes, so it will be interesting to hike it in summer and maybe take the inflatable kayaks along to have a paddle on Alice Lake.