The following is the transcript of our podcast episode on Camping Lights and Camping with Pets, enjoy!
Pamela:
Hello and good day, eh. Welcome to the Super Good Camping podcast. My name is Pamela.
Tim:
I’m Tim
Pamela:
and we are from supergoodcamping.com We are on a mission to inspire other parents to enjoy camping adventures with their kids such as we have with ours. Today we want to talk about lighting while you’re camping and also camping with your pets.
Lights for Camping
Tim:
It occurs to me that we have a number of different types of lights that we use when we’re camping. Front country or car camping and backcountry camping are slightly different. So I’ll talk about front-country camping and then we could just pull probably one out of the pile for the backcountry camping. When you’re talking around the picnic table, in the eating space, in the community outside of the tent area we tend to use… and I should probably preface this with there are no sponsorships here. When I use product names it’s simply because that’s what we own. I don’t mean anything. I can say that we like it or we don’t like it, that’s it. Nobody pays me anything.
Pamela:
Nobody’s gonna pull their sponsorship because we said that we hate their product.
Tim:
We have a Coleman lantern, it’s an eight-D cell battery lantern. Here’s a similar one.
So it’s heavy and clunky but it burns forever and has three different light levels – all quite nice features. It works well especially if we’ve got it in our cooking shelter. It’s great. You won’t have an issue because it’s an overcast day. You don’t have an issue with light in the middle of summer when you’re car camping inside of a provincial park. But as you get later in the evening, and hopefully you’ve pulled out a game of whatever – Monopoly, D&D, etc.
It’s a good light for that sort of deal. Outside of that. It’s heavy and clunky and it uses batteries. These are the kind of things that I’m not a fan of. It has its purpose. Outside of that, we use two or three other different types of lights. The two more straightforward ones are Luci lights. Again, not sponsored. They’re fantastic lights. They’re super light. They’re solar-powered in that they charge their own batteries with solar panels. They’re inflatable, meaning they’re collapsible plastic tubes that you can blow up.
So they float, they’re waterproof. They have, I believe two different levels of light, plus a red light so it doesn’t ruin your night vision plus a blinky light in an effort to signal distress. They last a long time. At full bore, they do trickle off. They’re good lights to plunk in the tent to read by and grab to make your nighttime trip to the potty. That sort of deal. They’re nice ones to grab if you’re going to sit around the fire and the fire is winnowing down or you want to read a book in your chair. They are good ones to prop on the arm of your chair and point a book towards and read that way. We also have just bought two new versions of Luci lights that are larger, and have two more levels of light. They also have a power bank in them so that you can charge your phone or whatever from them by USB. Again, solar-powered, et cetera, et cetera. There are two final types of lights. One would be headlamps. They play well in the front country or backcountry, it doesn’t matter. You can strap a headlamp on if you read, or during the bat hike. It’s fun to go out to watch the bats all come screaming out to eat up all the bugs that are making you crazy during the day. That’s a good thing to do. If you’re making a run for the privy in the middle of the night, strap a headlamp on. You can see well. If you’re up for a bike ride and it’s duskish, that’s a good time for a headlamp. If you’re in the backcountry, it is literally an essential part of your backcountry kit. You want to have a headlamp if you’re cave diving or spelunking.
Pamela:
We have gone spelunking with our headlamps.
Tim:
There you go.
Pamela:
It keeps your hands free so you can grab onto stuff.
Tim:
and that’s the trick. That’s a beautiful segue into number four, the last kind of lights – flashlights. They’re dependable. They’re in your pocket. They’re now push button. They have LED lights. They take three triple-As. They’re not a big deal. They don’t weigh anything. They’re pretty indestructible. It never hurts to have one around or Pamela just got a new keychain one. It’s teeny tiny, it takes one AAA battery and lasts for a long time. It’s a nice thing to have kicking around.
Pamela:
It’s LED and so it’s pretty bright too for the size of it.
Tim:
Yep, they throw the light pretty well. As LEDs progress, as the scientists get better with their stuff, you can see farther and farther with less and less power. So they’re awesome, especially if you use rechargeables, which we tend to do. Obviously not with watch batteries. They don’t have those out yet but triple-As, and double-As, we have so many rechargeable batteries. So there you go, there are camping lights for you.
Camping With Your Dog
Pamela:
That’s it for lighting on to camping with your pet. We have camped with two different dogs – our first dog Cookie and now with our second dog Farley. We camped at Killbear. I think it was with Cookie. And then maybe Arrowhead as well. And then subsequent parks have been with Farley. The rules, as far as camping with your dog, are that you must keep him or her on a six-foot leash at all times. There is a pet exercise area, which I think even then you’re supposed to maintain your dog on a leash. But in pet exercise areas sometimes, you can let them run free to get some exercise.
They’re never allowed on the people’s beach, but there is often a dog beach where you can take them so they can go for a swim or cool off. And when you leave your site, you must take your pet with you. You can’t leave them on the site by themselves. We’ve always as a practice at night, put our dogs in the car. Making sure that the windows are cracked a little bit if it has been a bit of a warm day. Usually, the temperature drops enough at night that they’ve been totally fine in the car. Just make sure to let them out once the sun starts hitting your site so they don’t get overheated in the car. I’m always up first in the morning and I take Farley out of the car by 7-8 a.m. It just keeps them safe at night so that they’re not being attacked by wild animals. It also keeps them from barking all night and keeping everybody else up because they’re hearing a raccoon skittering around or something.
Tim:
Eating my sugar cubes for my coffee in the morning…goofballs.
Pamela:
We don’t choose to take them into the tent, but that’s the other option is to take them into the tent with you. Our dogs are a bit restless so they’re going to keep us up half the night by moving around in the tent and/or barking at every little sound that they hear outside the tent. So we’ve chosen to put them in the car when we’re camping. And that’s been fine, we just are very mindful of the fact that the temperature can get hot, and we can’t just sleep in in the morning and leave them in there. So we’re always also mindful of getting up around seven o’clock or so in the morning to make sure that they can get out and they can cool off outside. It can get quite hot for them outside too because you’re out in the middle of the open. There’s no air conditioning, obviously. So it can get quite hot for them while you’re camping. You have to also be mindful of that if you have a dog that’s very sensitive to heat or an older dog. Ours is now classified as a senior dog and he has become a fair bit more intolerant of the heat with age. He has also become a bit more of a prima donna with age. If there’s something distasteful to him out in the campsite, like he’s getting dirty, he’s not comfortable, he wants to sit in the car, even though it might be 30 degrees outside, he still wants to be sitting in the car. We don’t let him, but he still wants to.
Tim:
But getting dirty. He’s happy to go dig, dig, dig, and absolutely throw dirt everywhere, which is why we don’t bring him into the tent because he’s a whack job.
Pamela:
Our advice is if you know you have a dog that tends to be fairly barky you might do all of your neighboring campers a favor and not bring him or her with you when you’re camping, maybe find a boarding place. But ours, if they do bark, tend to be fairly quiet and just to let us know that there’s somebody close by but for the most part, our dogs are fairly well-trained not to be really loud.
Tim:
Yeah, so when the raccoons ate my sugar cubes, it was the raccoons that woke me up, not the dog. If I have anything to add to that, when you’re looking at the Ontario Parks website, make sure that the site you’re looking at is not in a dog-free area because they do have those.
Pamela:
Dogs are not allowed in the comfort stations either, by the way.
Tim:
Yeah, there are a lot of dog rules and they’re well laid out. I know weird for a government-run website [sarcasm], but I’m just saying they are laid out well. You do have to look for things like if there’s a dog beach or a pet exercise area, they’re not always well-flagged. Sometimes it’s easier if you filter your searches for that specifically, otherwise, for the most part, animals are welcome in the parks. Not necessarily all your neighbors are going to be thrilled about it but such is life.
Pamela:
Please make sure that you pick up after your pet.
Tim:
Stoop and scoop.
Pamela:
Always, always armed with poop bags, just so that you can stoop and scoop after your pet.
Tim:
That’s the brilliant meme that’s out there. It’s like: Camping – the one place in the world where you can be in your pajamas, with a bag of poop in your hand, and have quite a nice chat with your neighbor.
Pamela:
And on that note, we are recording this just before Christmas 2021. We hope that you have a wonderful and safe Christmas. We will be enjoying very small celebrations with family and we’ll be back in the New Year!
Tim:
Jingle jangle! Hope you’re all having a good one.
Pamela:
Please do reach out to us anytime our email address is hi@supergoodcamping.com. We are on all of the social media please reach out to us on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. We would love to hear from you and we hope you enjoy hearing from us. Talk to you soon!
Tim:
Bye bye