Car Camping: The Whole Trip, From Booking to Packing Up

What car camping actually is

It is not sleeping in the car (that is car sleeping, or dispersed camping), and it is not RV camping. The tent is on the ground and the car is a large, lockable, weatherproof storage box parked ten feet away, which is the single biggest luxury in camping.

Booking the trip

Book earlier than feels necessary. Popular state and national park campgrounds release sites months ahead and the good ones go in minutes on summer weekends. When you book, check four things on the site listing:

• Is there a picnic table? Most established campgrounds provide one. If so, you can skip buying a camp table entirely.
• Is there a fire ring, and are fires currently allowed? Bans are common in summer and are announced at short notice.
• Where is the water? A tap at the site, or a shared one 200 yards away, changes how many containers you need.
• What is the surface? Grass, gravel or a hard pad decides whether standard stakes will hold and whether you want a footprint.

For a first trip, pick somewhere within about two hours of home. If it goes badly you can leave, and knowing that removes most of the anxiety.

What to bring

The full list, grouped and printable, is the car camping checklist. The short version is that a car camping kit is built around five systems:

Packing the car

Load in reverse order of use, so the first thing you need is the last thing in. That means the tent goes in last and comes out first, because it needs to be up before the light goes.

1. Deep in the trunk: chairs, table, spare clothing, anything for day two.
2. Middle: kitchen box, stove, water containers.
3. Top and accessible: tent, mallet, headlamps, and a bag with the first meal in it.
4. In the cabin: the cooler, out of the hot trunk, and anything you need at a stop.

Two habits that pay for themselves: use one plastic bin for the kitchen so it never gets unpacked at home and repacked wrong, and keep the tent stakes and mallet inside the tent bag rather than in a separate box that gets left behind.

Setting up, in the right order

1. Walk the site first. Find the flattest ground, check what is above you, and note where water would run if it rained hard.
2. Pitch the tent. Doors away from the prevailing wind, on a very slight rise rather than in the flattest hollow.
3. Beds in. Pads inflated and bags unrolled while it is still light. A sleeping bag lofts better for having sat unpacked for a few hours.
4. Kitchen next. Cooler in the shade, stove downwind, water where it can be lifted without moving anything.
5. Light before dusk. Hang the lantern while you can still see the hook.
6. Chairs last. Then sit in one.

The mistakes that ruin first trips

• Arriving after dark. Everything above is easy in daylight and hard by headlamp. Aim to be on site three hours before sunset on your first trip.
• A thin sleeping pad. The most common cause of a cold, sleepless night, and the one people blame on the tent.
• One water container. You need drinking water and washing water, and one jug means constant walking.
• An ambitious first dinner. Cook something you have cooked before, or eat something that only needs boiling water. Night one is not the night to learn a camp kitchen.
• No plan for rain. A tarp or an awning over the table converts a rained-out weekend into a normal one, and it costs very little.

Food, without overthinking it

Night one: something reheated that you cooked at home, frozen flat in a bag. It thaws in the cooler on the drive and doubles as ice. Day two breakfast: eggs, or oatmeal if you want to skip washing a pan. Night two: one-pot pasta, which needs one pot and one burner.

Keeping it all cold is a technique problem more than an equipment problem — see how to keep food cold camping.

Packing up

Dry the tent as much as you can before it goes in the bag, even if that means draping it over the car for twenty minutes. A tent packed wet and left for a week is how tents get mildewed, and mildew does not come out.

At home, unpack the same day: air the tent, air the sleeping bags, and store bags uncompressed in the big sack rather than the stuff sack. Compressed insulation loses loft permanently, which quietly makes a good bag colder every season.

Where to go next

If the trip went well and you have children, the next read is family camping with kids. If it went well and you found yourself wondering what is further up the trail, that is your first backpacking trip, and the difference between the two kits is worked through in car camping vs backpacking.