So how do people occupy the time in the evenings when camping out – whether that’s in a tent, caravan or of course a fabulous VW camper? I would say at this point that my very first hirers did come back with a lovely sticker for Dylan saying “Don’t come a-knockin’ if this vans a-rockin’!” – say no more on that though.
Well, with modern technology, it would be easy to resort to handheld console games (yes, we know what they’re called but I’m not going to publicise them here now am I!!), or a portable dvd player or even clever mobile phones with a multitude of games on them. Not that I have anything against any of these, it’s just then when camping, in my very modest opinion, in order to get the best out of the whole experience, you need to embrace the “back to basics” thinking.
So, once you’ve done the windsurfing/walking/sandcastle building/burger burning – oops I mean barbecuing, what do you do to wind down (even more…)?
For the peace-loving, sit around the campfire, watch the stars and look for constellations or if you’re really lucky, shooting stars.
For the fun-loving, always take a pack of cards! I’ve just taught my 2 little folk how to play rummy and it has now become a firm favourite, when camping and at home! Remember Battleships? No, none of this fancy boards and pegs and things, just a couple of pieces of paper and some pencils! Draw a grid, place your “ships” on your grid with crosses, put letters down one side of the grid and numbers along the other and off you go… Even simpler but just as much fun is Squares – make a square of dots, each player makes a line joining two dots, whilst trying to stop the other players from making a square. To start off with it’s easy to start filling the grid but eventually the dots become fewer and fewer and so the squares become easier to complete. When a player makes a square, they put their initials in the square and they then have another go. The winner is the person with the most squares once the whole grid has been filled. Now you can make this a quick game by having a small grid or a longer one by having more dots – it’s kind of addictive once you get going though and especially if you have a bit of a competitive streak…
Other games – and these are ones we have in Dylan are Pass The Pigs, the Yes/No game as well as a pack of playing cards….
Any other ideas? What do you do? Do let us know….
