What do you pack for a camping holiday, and how do you pack it?

[MsRumpole]

It turns out that I really like camping and want to do more of it. But the way we packed for the trip and how we shopped for food also filled me with woe and the car with disorganised insanity.

What tricks am I missing? We're planning to camp at sites with good basics (shower, loos, sinks, drinkable water, near to but not actually in a village with a shop) but probably without mains power, so am also interested in how people shop for and store food without a fridge.

I tend to keep all my camping gear apart from my tent in a couple or 30 litre really useful storage boxes. One with all my cooking and eating equipment and one with my sleeping mat, sleeping bag, chair, table, lanterns and odds and ends in. In my car, I have a couple of expanding boot storage boxes to keep my stuff tidy inside the tent.

Clothes, wash bag and towel go in a large reusable bag from B&M.

I don’t have electrical hook up or take a cool box as there’s not a huge amount of space in my car, I usually eat out at lunch and have snacks and red wine in the evening. Breakfast is something like homemade porridge pots, pancakes or french toast. I’ll make a fruit loaf, flapjacks and trail mix to take as well. Tins of soup, beans, tuna, instant mash, cous cous, apples, cherry tomatoes, crisps, pita bread etc don’t need to be kept cold. Tea and coffee are passable with powdered milk for a few days. Just pick up fresh food on a daily basis if you need it.

Oh and a couple of power banks for charging phones.

Get a decent cool box. Can be small if you like, but if you cook stews and similar before hand and freeze them, they will stay frozen until you warm them up.
The packets of pasta rice etc you just add water to are also absolutely fine for a day or two.

Glad you enjoyed camping!

Have a look round the MN Camping Board for threads about ‘lovely set up’, food and kit.

I have a ‘high performance’ passive cool box. I.e not electric but very good insulation. Examples are the Coleman Xtreme, or pricier ones from Icey Tek or Yeti. But they last forever. If you pre-chill and fill with frozen / chilled food and good blocks or ice they are good for about 4 days.

You can take a pre/frozen curry or bolognrse sauce, for example, something (frozen) to BBQ, and keep milk cold.

Pouch food is also good. Microwave rice can be heated quickly in a pan. Or a pouch of re-fried beans, packs of tortilla keep well, can of chilli, microwave ‘Mexican rice’.

Pack of tortillas, 2 sandwiched together with ready grated cheese, refried beans or tinned corn or anything you like, dry fry in frying pan : Quesadillas!

Basically you want things that are quick to cook, not long simmering stuff that wil use up all your gas.

Bags of brioche rolls, the individually wrapped pains chocolat, bananas, satsumas.

I have never eaten a pot noodle when camping. And as a family we used to cook over the campfire and do whole chickens with veg and spuds in a Dutch Pot, but now I camp in smaller groups / everyone is veggie / the novelty of campfire cooking as an activity in itself has worn off I mostly can’t be arsed.

You get used to your camping style, what suits you, what you need, what is unnecessary ‘stuff’.

Imodium, packed in easy access places.

If you have a decent solid cool box, cool it for 24 hours BEFORE packing to go, with ice. Then empty that ice out, and fill with the cool things from the fridge and either a bottle of water you have pre-frozen or a dinner for the 1st (or 2nd) night that you had frozen - like the Bol sauce for spaghetti Bol, or chilli con carbs sauce or a curry sauce etc - where you are only cooking pasta or rice fresh and just reheating a defrosted sauce. But the pre-cooking really does help.

i didn’t do but a fellow Scouter who did a lt of family camping swore by “give each DC an ikea blue bag for all their clothes and bits - easy to manage for smaller people to find what they want and easy for adults to throw their into from a cross the tent”… his words.

I have an Ikea 22 l box with all my kitchen bits in - easy to pack and easy to work from. I use proper sharp kitchen knives - but they each have covers to prevent cut knuckles finding them in the box along with the other kitchen tools.

Oh, and make the dry ingredients part of pancakes in a clean old milk bottle - to just add milk (and an egg?) and shake madly to get easy to pour batter for early mornings in the pan.

And a roll of tin foil in your kit is great for bbqs or campfires to cook loads of different things that are wet or slightly wet, so not good directly on a grate - so mushrooms with salt/pepper and a knob of butter to serve with your steak, for example.

I pack clothes in blue IKEA bags. Also bedding.

A plastic crate for my kitchen box.

And I have little collapsible crates like THIS (but most of mine were v cheap from The Range): 2 on my kitchen table with condiments, tin opener, matches, bottle opener etc. One by my bed to put phone, penknife, torch, earrings etc in.

Food - we never try to take all the food for the week with us, we mostly shop as we go, for fresh stuff anyway. (Nothing fancy, but there’s usually a few good little shops on the way home from wherever we’ve been and we keep it simple).
So we have a Coleman xtreme cool box, and the campsites we go to usually have a large communal freezer specifically for refreezing ice packs, so we do that - a fresh set of frozen packs every day or so. We take milk, butter and cans of g&t / bottles of nice beer, bacon for first morning, a bit of salad, and buy cheese / hummus as needed.

We also take the wherewithal for first night meal - generally an easy pasta dish. And cereal, bread, eggs, Nutella, can of beans, apples, biscuits crisps and chocolate :-). And I pack a small bottle of oil, couple of pots of herbs, pepper and salt, ketchup, sugar, and mixed cinnamon sugar for French toast.

Then we’ll make things like sausage pasta / casserole, or cook steaks etc on bbq, or mackerel, or do burgers or sausages (we usually bbq peppers too so it’s not too meaty). Ginger cake and custard or a piece of chocolate for puds.

It is worth a bit of a mental plan first but these days we know what we tend to use and keep a list on the computer that we print out each time to check off!

Camping kit - yes, in big boxes in the garage ready to go. Have duplicates of pans, chopping board, etc.

This is great, thank you! I had no idea there was a camping board - thanks, @FollowSpot !

Investing in a decent coldbox sounds key as does separate bags for clothes...

No, I don’t have a camping fridge - just a normal decent quality cool box. We use ice packs like I said, and the campsites we’ve been to always have a communal freezer available solely for people to refreeze their ice packs. Though I reckon we’d be able to last a few days keeping things cool without it, just by pre cooking and packing it well. Easier with though!