Category: camping

Dehydrating homemade backpacking meals

We’ve used pre-made dehydrated meals for years for the convenience, but always felt they were not exactly what we wanted. Meals either weren’t something our kids liked, had a funny aftertaste, had more sodium than we wanted, or didn’t have a plant-based option. Plus we didn’t love all of the excessive, bulky packaging that they come in. We recently decided to start making our own meals using a food dehydrator and the meals have been SO DELICIOUS! Why did we wait so long?!

Tips to help your child sleep when camping

The most challenging part of camping with kids is getting them to sleep well. We’ve tried a variety of tactics to help ours fall and stay alseep. These are our top tips.

How we stay warm in our van during the winter

We do not have a diesel heater in our van, but we are able to keep cozy during the winter months camping with the following tricks.

Tent camping with kids

We’ve camped everywhere from the beach and the desert, to the mountains and everything in-between with our kids. Sleeping in a tent with little ones was a big departure from our former days as backpackers sans kiddos. Now with kids, we’ve tried lots of different options and we are sharing our experience, good and bad. There’s so many different factors that go into camping in a tent with kids such as professional organization guidelines, family preferences, child needs, and style of camping to name a few. For this reason, what we are sharing in this blog is not recommendations for what you should do, but rather a description of what WE do. And what we do continues to evolve as our children grow and new equipment is developed in the ever expanding realm of outdoor gear.

camping gear list

We are self-proclaimed gear junkies. We love having the right “stuff” to make any adventure a little easier or more fun. Across countless camping outings we have discovered that quality gear is important in order to make the camping experience a blast.

Camping essentials for babies

Heading out on a camping trip with little kids can be exciting but also a bit daunting. We have found a few helpful pieces of gear make time around camp a little bit easier.

Backpacking Gear list

We’ve compiled a list of gear we used to go backpacking with our two kids in the desert.

books for the outdoorsy toddler

We’ve found that reading books to our kids about the outdoors has helped inspire excitement for any family outdoor activity. We put together this list of our favorite books that have helped teach our kids about so many things: animals, plants, seasons, the sun and moon, camping, fire safety, bugs, colors, hiking…the list goes on and on!

9 Tips For Backpacking With a Baby

One of the biggest challenges we faced when we talked about of having children was a loss of our freedom to backpack. So many people with children told us that we would have to wait years before we could get back out on the trail. If you find yourself in similar shoes, let us tell you that IT’S NOT TRUE! We’ve done it and our family of three has lived to tell about it…and had fun doing it!

Bryce Canyon National Park

This national park has always been a bit elusive to us.  It’s not really on the way to anywhere, which kept if off our radar for far too long.  After a strong recommendation from a friend, we decided to make a dedicated trip to see the mystical wonders of the hoodoos.