Why I hate camping
Camping; a great British pastime that to me is one of life’s truly overrated experiences. I went camping once and I’ve vowed never to go again. If I ever get even a little bit tempted to join friends on their camping trips, I always remember the reasons why I hate it so much. Then I spend the next few days sat at home in my warm house, sleeping in a comfortable bed, smiling to myself in the knowledge that one of them will be stumbling to a nearby bush in the early hours of the morning to urinate and will probably tread barefoot in fox’s shit.

Reasons why I hate camping so much:

It could be the middle of a glorious summer, a delightful heat wave period, but rest assured, as soon as you pitch a tent it will start raining. Once it starts, it doesn’t stop, and it is impossible to keep anything dry. Clothes, personal belongings (such as phones and wallets), seating and even food will soon be damp. Don’t even think about trying to start a raging fire for you and your fellow campers to congregate by. Instead, you’ll be forced to huddle around a smouldering pile of sticks in an effort to keep warm.

Once sat in your huddle, there will always be someone in the group who will get out their guitar that they have brought with them especially. After a few minutes of strumming out-of-tune chords, they will try and get everyone else to join in with renditions of Kum-By-Yah or some other song that nobody really likes nor indeed knows the words to. A few campers will start clapping along. It is at this point you should consider going home.

The food is always terrible. As it is neigh on impossible to plug in a freezer, tinned foods are on the menu for the majority of the camping period. Granted, a few sausages may be cooked on the first night, but after these have been consumed you can only look forward to a diet of sludge. Any meat that is cooked will be nice and crispy on the outside, and raw on the inside. Unless you have a cast iron gut, you’ll be squatting in the bushes in no time at all.

If there are no toilet facilities (because you’ve chosen to camp in some woods rather than a site), then you’ll have to make do with a bush. How great is that! If neither of these choices appeal to you, you have the option of holding it in until you get home. What a fantastic holiday experience.

Due to the above reasons, most people will be in a pretty bad mood, and conversation will therefore be mundane and quite frankly, annoying. Typically, some cad will start to tell ghost stories as the night draws in. Yawn.

Sleeping is impossible. If you’re not sat with your eyes wide open, saying “what’s that?” worriedly at every noise you hear and thinking the worst, you’re laying shivering in a sleeping bag, with only the tent canvas between you and the wet grass. The wind will blow the sides of the tent in, sticking it to your face as it is so wet, and there will always be, without fail, an earwig or beetle underneath your sleeping bag in the morning.

The games you are forced to play such as Rounders or some other nonsense sport, which always results in the alpha male of the group smashing a ball with a lump of wood into a nearby field so that a group of children and women scamper after it, trying to avoid the cow-pat landmines. The same resulting arguments always follow during these games; ‘I was no way out!’ or ‘Those aren’t the rules!’, for example.


The tent itself is one of the most annoying things about camping. Putting the thing together in the first place is akin to a challenge you’d find on The Krypton Factor. Again, arguments will ensue, normally about which piece of the frame goes where. There is a high chance that at least one peg will be missing, so the tent will have to be weighed down from the inside. I am also under the impression that the manufacturers base their tent sizes on dwarves. ‘Two man’ tents are only really suitable for a child, a six-man tent can fit 3 people at a push; you get the idea. Then there is the sweaty condensation that forms on the inside of the tent, so that it clings to you should you be so brave to put your face anywhere near it. Tents are rubbish. I’d rather sleep in my car.

The air of depression in the car on the way home, once the camping trip is over. It’s the realisation that you’ve wasted a few days of your life to live outside. All your clothes are dirty and wet, and you have to take all of your rubbish back home with you. Why did you go camping? Why?!


People always tell me, ‘camping isn’t like that anymore, they have showers and everything!’. Well I should fucking think so! A shower is the minimum I’d expect if I was going on holiday. The absolute minimum! Plus, surely staying on a campsite is the cheats way to camping? Any excuse for them to say that they’ve been on holiday really, but it’s not proper camping. It’s not too disimilar from me pitching a tent in my back garden, and then nipping inside to use the shower every morning.


I don’t know what the big appeal is about the ‘Great’ Outdoors. I think maybe it stems from the youthful enjoyment of building a den with your mates, and pretending you were on some sort of great adventure. There can’t be any other reason for it. Sometimes, I do have a guilty admiration for those people that enjoy camping, but then this admiration soon passes and I think to myself, ‘Grow up and have a proper holiday’.
(Monkey the Chicken Twitter: death_stairs, Mon 2 Apr 2012, 15:05, 26 replies)

ABRIDGED VERSION: I'm a camping spacker

(TheColonel, Mon 2 Apr 2012, 15:08, closed)

^

( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Mon 2 Apr 2012, 15:38, closed)

Pretty much.
I've been camping loads of times, and I love it. Bivvying down under the stars without a tent is even more fun. Bloody cold if your sleeping back isn't thick enough though.
(The Luggage is haunted..., Mon 2 Apr 2012, 15:39, closed)

I read that as
"Bivvying down under the stairs"

Must be the internet shut-in in me.
(TheColonel, Mon 2 Apr 2012, 16:10, closed)

Or you secretly want to be Harry Potter.

(The Luggage is haunted..., Mon 2 Apr 2012, 16:56, closed)

This is truly magnificent...

I was considering writing something similar to this - and now I'm fucking glad I didn't. This beats the living (outdoor) shit out of anything I could produce.

This post doesn't just win, it utterly destroys the competition before flushing them away in some over-used, foully despicable chemical lavvy that was once a washing up bowl.

One click is just not enough, sir.

*stands and applauds*
( Pooflake braces for an onslaught..., Mon 2 Apr 2012, 15:31, closed)

^ What soapy tit wank said ^

( The Mock Turtle ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Mon 2 Apr 2012, 15:45, closed)

I love you, TMT...

and I want to have your babies.
(Mr Twisty Cheeky The worst kept secret in B3ta..., Mon 2 Apr 2012, 15:46, closed)

Are you a bummer?
If so REEEEEEEESSSUUULT!!!!!!
( The Mock Turtle ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Mon 2 Apr 2012, 18:15, closed)

Thank you!

(Monkey the Chicken Twitter: death_stairs, Mon 2 Apr 2012, 16:55, closed)

Ignore the 'pro camping plebs'
This is exactly what the experience is like. Kudos to you!
click
(King Nightmare, Mon 2 Apr 2012, 15:41, closed)

oh god, this.
except you forgot to add that if you have the misfortune to be camping at a festival, other people will stumble over your tent in the night; some cunt on ketamine will be having a psychotic episode with some fucking bongos at 4am and WITHOUT FAIL you will be sick in a carrier bag at some point as your tent is too small and too hot to escape from quickly when in the grip of a rampaging cider hangover.

shit. i've only bought a fucking ticket again for this year...
( janet aylia y'all motherfuckers need jesus, Mon 2 Apr 2012, 15:51, closed)

We may not always see eye-to-eye, Janet...

and by that I mean, it appears (quite rightly) that you consider me to be an utter ball-sack, but I feel compelled to say your reply was top notch, and I couldn't agree more.

*scurries away, still despising camping, whilst eyeing up festival tickets*
( Pooflake braces for an onslaught..., Mon 2 Apr 2012, 16:05, closed)

Janet is actually quite a nice person under all those layers of blubber and hatred.

( The Mock Turtle ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Mon 2 Apr 2012, 18:17, closed)

shush it, you terrible bully.

( janet aylia y'all motherfuckers need jesus, Mon 2 Apr 2012, 20:00, closed)

Be nice.

(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Mon 2 Apr 2012, 20:43, closed)

You just need to plan better.
There are things that you can bring that aren't tinned that will be fine for days without refrigeration. You can cook meats before you go, then just re-heat them at mealtime. You can carry pasta and some dried packaged sauces. You can carry some mung beans in a plastic bottle with holes in the lid, water them and shake out the water for a couple of days, and wallah, fresh bean sprouts.

They make a camping shower that's basically a hot water bottle with a shower head under it that you hang up from a tree branch.

Use hair and body wash instead of bars of soap, as it will avoid sticky disgusting bars of soap.

Carry along paper plates so you can just toss them in the fire after eating. Paper, not plastic or styrofoam.

Bring a deck of cards and play poker. If it's a mixed group, make it strip poker.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Mon 2 Apr 2012, 20:03, closed)

I didn't think anything could make camping worse.
But you've done it with "mung beans". They cause goatees, you know.
(ubergeekian, Mon 2 Apr 2012, 21:33, closed)

and sandals.
mung beans are the primary cause of sandals on people over the age of seven.
( janet aylia y'all motherfuckers need jesus, Mon 2 Apr 2012, 21:50, closed)

I love the Great Outdoors....
....but I hate camping. Fucking hate it. I hated before I went travelling for a year, hated whilst I lay huddled up to my wife to be under two sleeping bags, four Roumanian blankets and both of our leather jackets, and I hate it now.

Nearly as much as I hate those hopeless wankers who insist on carrying a fucking guitar with them on overland trips to make everyone suffer their brand of shite music when you'd rather be asleep or just chatting to the more interesting people. I've yet to meet a guitar-taker-on-holiday who isn't a terminal arsehole.
(Colonel Blink is now officially a pretentious prick, Mon 2 Apr 2012, 22:01, closed)

If you're getting wet in a tent
You've pitched it wrong. That's all there is to it. If your food is raw on the inside, it's because you're shit at cooking. If you can't set fire to things properly, petrol is always a help. Also, you are shit at setting fire to things.


The OP was written by somebody who tried camping once or twice for a few nights at a time without any idea of what they were doing past reading the "instructions" on the tent bag. Saying that camping is like that all the time is like not putting oil in your car and complaining when the engine blows up. Technically it might have happened anyway, but mainly it's your own fault.
( MatJ LOOK, Tue 3 Apr 2012, 0:15, closed)

^

( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Tue 3 Apr 2012, 8:14, closed)

good god yes...
got to say I utterly hate camping, and that sums it perfectly for me
( theoriginalsteve <this space intentionally left blank>, Tue 3 Apr 2012, 13:08, closed)

So you mean that shit camping is shit?
Sleeping on a camp bed in a tent on a dry summer night is no different to sleeping in a bed in a hotel.
Granted shared toilets aren't the best thing but some are regularly cleaned so it's not much different to going at work.
Not showering for a day or two can make you feel dirty -- but if you've never stayed over a a mate's after going out and not showered until the next evening you're probably in a minority.
Camping is what you make it and where and when you go. If you only go to cheap camp sites in November in the UK it will be cold, miserable and damp. If you camped in the Sahara it would be completely different.
It sounds like your friends are ill-prepared, go to shit camp sites and are rather dull.
(Me, I'm not... in any way intoxicated, Tue 3 Apr 2012, 18:00, closed)

I have to say I agree with the pro camping lot...
Camping *is* going to be shit if you do it horribly, on the other hand, do it properly and most of your causes for hatred are nullified...

A soggy floppy tent with missing pegs just means you haven't taken care of it, lost half the pegs and can't put it up properly - mine still holds up fine after years worth of use: I bought a decent one to start with, learnt how to put it up properly and pack it up properly at the end and it is fine.

Similarly with the food, sure you can't keep milk and fresh meat uncooled in the wilderness for a week, but you can still cook fantastic food on a camp fire or stove. I have had great meals some people would be pushed to make in a full kitchen prepared on a single burner gas stove...

As for idiots with guitars, alpha males playing rounders and all that bollocks, don't go camping with twats... Head out with some friends that know what they are doing and have been camping a few times before and you can stay warm and dry whatever the weather (ie proper waterproofs, put up the tent properly and learn to make a fire properly), and when it is sunny instead of soggy, you can relax and enjoy yourself away from the mess of normal life.
(442, Wed 4 Apr 2012, 13:47, closed)

CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK
I like this.

Very much.

CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK.

I used to go camping quite a lot with my family, who were experienced in camping. My wife and son like camping.

I still utterly, utterly hate hate hate it though.

Don't mind being outside in the countryside when the weather isn't awful, but as soon as it hits night time you can go and tickle yourself if you think I'm sleeping in anything without electricity and solid walls.
( Mike Fishcake teamfishcake.co.uk - better than your mum's face, Thu 5 Apr 2012, 11:53, closed)