[Whew, I got a little hot under the collar about Yellowstone in that last post didn’t I? What can I say? I’m on my fifth espresso and I and I bristle that Yellowstone treats American citizens like pets. I often avoid that otherwise gorgeous place because of the hassles. Lucky for me, this walkabout was about thawing out, not tangling with the Federales over a bottle of beer on a picnic table. I stayed out of Yellowstone this trip.]
There is (or was) an activity called “car camping”. I dropped out of the scene and went hard core backcountry for decades. Then came a tragic period of being “too busy” to get out there. Last year I tried to regain past glories but it didn’t work out.
On one particular outing, for a variety of reasons, I didn’t make it to the “wilderness”. Adaptably (see what I did there?) I went to “Plan B”. I “day tripped” around the edges of wilderness and set up my lightweight canoe camping gear in a nearby State Park for the night.
It’s probably for the best because everything went wrong. I expected low key “next to the truck” camp to be much easier than “backcountry” endeavors but it was a fiasco. To start with, I froze my balls off. (In backcountry I can adapt to unexpected cold with a big fire and tarp, in a park I didn’t have extra fuel to burn.) More importantly, sleeping on the ground gave me aches and pains that went straight to the core of my body. Ouch! I have a superlative sleeping bag. A “Big Agnes”. (I may review it sometime.) It has built in padding and I’ve always been comfortable in it (or at least “comfortable” in terms of tradeoffs with backcountry camping) but not this time. I suspect I’ve changed (not the forest and not my gear).
Sleeping on the ground sucked. It’s a fact I won’t dance around. I’m getting’ old and denial isn’t how I roll. It was time to re-evaluate, re-equip, and adapt! For a while, hopefully temporarily, I felt it would be wise to become a “car camper”.
Except I’m obsolete. “Car camping” is a term that seems long gone and folks who camp on a State Park pad are pandered to with mixed message marketing. First, it’s as if they’re summiting Everest. “Buy the new ‘Bear Grills Super Tactical X-Mod 37 Sleeping Pad System’.” Really? What fresh hell is this? Words like “tactical” and “extreme” for hanging out at super-tame State Parks? Then they shift to pushing cheap-ass chickenshit gear that’ll barely hold up for a single weekend. The kind of useless crap that will dissolve if it gets wet or dirty or exposed to any rough conditions.
Eventually I deduced that, for my new desire for heavier gear (as opposed to lightweight backpacking stuff), there’s a “new” term: “Overlanding”.
As far as I can tell “Overlanding” is when you outfit your $40,000(!) lifted super-Jeep with enough stuff to cross the Australian outback. Then you drive around enjoying yourself. God bless the internal combustion engine!
Overlanding shit is heavy so you never camp far from the vehicle. Allowing for gear heavy enough to kill a backpacker earns you the benefit of more creature comforts. Theoretically, “overlanding” means you’re capable of camping “primitively”; meaning you’re self-supporting for anywhere your vehicle goes. Heavy gear is fine for a State Park with flush toilets but “overlanding” you can happily overnight just along a dirt road somewhere.
I’m not making light of this. I think I’ve found an acceptable niche. If I’ve got to dial back (temporarily!) on backcounty trips, it’s more my style to “Overland” along some random dirt track than “Car Camp” in a Park.
“Overlanding” opened new opportunities. All winter long, my visions filled with the amazing luxuries I cannot take backpacking but fit easily in any vehicle. Bigger tents, coolers, chairs, BEER! The mind boggles! I decided to “Overland”. At least for now, I will camp within sight of my Dodge.
Unfortunately, all my tried and true gear is optimized for backcounty use. Also, most of it is 20 years old and every bit has seen hard wear. I’d trust my life to my battle-scarred gear, but it’s ill-suited to new ideas and tamer outings.
Where all this digression is leading is that I’ve geared up in entirely novel ways (for me). This particular Walkabout is a “test run” of future “overlanding” adventures. It’s hard letting go of my old approach of “disappear for weeks using only what you can carry” but I’ve earned a chance to bask in luxuries.
The city of Guam is where I started testing my new theories. Predictably, it’s where I met my first obstacle. As is always the case for me, things got weird. Stay tuned.