7/10/19 Woko National Park nr Gloucester NSW Svend & Helen are now back in sunny Australia & went camping over the October long weekend. Completely ‘off the grid’ with no electricity, no supplied water & no Internet. It also our first time camping for about 8 years & we have to admit that things have changed quite a lot. So we gathered together our faithful & well used camping equipment thinking “it will be fine, it’ll do, she’ll be right mate”. Like a woman who hadn’t been out on the town for quite a few years & thought she’d use her “best dress” that had been hanging in the cupboard (a few years lets say) for a night out in 2019. And just like that dress even though it has hardly been used, it somehow manages to look retro & out of place in the new age & leaves you feeling, if not embarrassed but that somewhat lacking! Well let me tell you, things are a changing in the camping world & at the same time I can solve the mystery for all those financial analysts of just where the earnings of those 30 something’s are going. Its gong on swanky camping trailers, (the likes of we’ve never seen outside a showroom), fancy dual cab utes to tow said camper, not to mention the new equipment you now appear to need for a ‘cheap holiday ‘ with your young brood., such as Solar panels by the dozen, toilet tents & nothing less than a Weber BBQ. So these 30 something’s (I’m not sure if they are millennials, x, y or naughties) apparently are generally home renters who have given up on the thought of buying their own home & are using their money to buy camping equipment that we could only imagine we would own when we were nearing retirement (or rather when we could afford it). Somehow we never seem to get to that moment, thinking that all this “stuff” is extravagant or we don’t actually need it, when we already have something that has worked perfectly fine in the past. Our 30 something neighbours seemed to be a mothers group of sorts with a few young children each, husbands with lots of tattoos & all having a similar camper trailers, like matching book ends with a huge annex communal area in between. It brought back memories of how we introduced our friends to camping when our youngest son was about 18 months old. Our first camping trip was with our old faithful A frame tent that had done us well pre kids & we’d taken it out to see how we went with two small kids. Once again we were in for a shock, as all other tents were the new Dome design & we once again felt out of place & we really were “retro”, & that didn’t go unnoticed. Our then neighbours of young guys obviously felt sorry for this little, poor family with two small boys squeezed into our A Frame tent, that when they left they came over & gave us all their left over frozen steaks & chicken, thinking we were on a hard budget. We’ve laughed at that many times, but it was pretty nice of them non the less & how could we refuse a random act of kindness like that. So, pretty quickly after that we researched the new Dome tents on the market in all the upmarket camping stores (Kangaroo Tent City I think it was), however Kmart happened to have a tent sale at the same time & for some inexplicable reason we got at least 5 sets of friends to buy one too. So whenever we went camping we looked like a cult with the same green Dome tent. I’m not sure we would be able to persuade our new mothers group to fork out thousand’s of dollars on the new camper they would need to get these days, but that $100 tent was used on numerous fun camping trips with the same friends. It all seems so complicated now but having said that we have never been ones to over do the equipment no matter where we have gone. We did buy a big dome tent with several rooms, lasting about 2 trips when we both decided that it took too much effort & time, to put up & we promptly sold it as soon as we could. Returning very quickly to a small dome design that takes us 13 minutes to put up & be ready with a beer. Yes the one we took to the Kimberley & every trip before & after. So the question now is what do we do? Do we upgrade & get a camper, or we could get the flip tent on the roof style as we do actually own the required Toyota Land cruiser 4wd but not glamped out as much as it could be. Or do we continue as before with our tried & trusted equipment. That is the mystery??? & so in the future maybe Ill blog again & the answer will be revealed!
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