Getting The Food Preparation Gear For A Camping Holiday Right Is Easier Nowadays
This year we were anticipating packing the car up the moment my wife’s school broke up, motoring for the coast and sailing across to France and going down to a camp site about 50 miles south of Paris. It was part of an intended strategy to get away more at weekends, both for our own benefit and that of our little boy who is approaching four. We thought he was getting to the stage where he’d like the experience, get him used to longer journeys and travelling around the country to places we like or haven’t been to before.
We were going to start gradually by setting the tent up and spending a weekend camping in the garden which would give us the opportunity to try out all the tools, make sure the tent, which has not been out for a few years, was still waterproof and if not, either repair it or buy a replacement.
I was looking forward to getting all the gear out as some of it is quite cool and good fun. We have for instance, a paraffin Tilly lamp which is not only a powerful light but – useful on cold nights – also puts out loads of heat. Best of all, is the camp kitchen which we found when on a trip in the United Arab Emirates and with which I fell in love immediately. It has a work surface, shelves and cup hooks and is fitted with a kitchen sink and draining board and folds down into an easily portable case. It’s fantastic, and when coupled with a bbq brings a whole new dimension to camping in repect of cleanliness and making life around the tent easier.
The question of the site bbq is imporoving, the problems in the past have been ones of portability. That’s if you are permitted one on the site which is not always the case. But the usual problem of whether to take a charcoal barbeque or a gas barbeque comes back with a slightly different twist.
The question of having a charcoal barbeque generally involves the amount of time and skill needed to light it, keep it burning and safety when it’s finished. With camping comes the concern of space and a bbq of any type can compromise this. A “disposable” bbq may seem to be the answer but I once almost set fire to my tent and a field when the thin foil tray that it was contained in collapsed because of the heat.
A gas barbeque can be a good idea but problems may occur if you also have a camp hob as well and you find, like we did that they have different sorts of gas and so 2 bottles are necessary, again not helping the space issue (and weight come to that).
However, developments have happened recently which have seen sturdy bbq units which are able to fold down into smaller more manageable sizes which mean that it is easier to pack into a limited area in the boot of a car. This also applies to a gas barbeque as well although the problem of the bottle remains.
However, all plans for us for this year were thrown to the winds when my wife was diagnosed with cancer in the early spring which has lead to postponing all schemes but, as football fans say at the end of a season in which nothing has been won and relegation avoided – there’s always next year.
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