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First Time Bike Camping (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/camping@sh.itjust.works
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I put together a simple ~40mi/65km day trip to test out bike camping! Things went pretty well all things considered, getting out of the city and back is always the hard part in the ol US of A. I really couldn't have asked for better weather.

Lessons Learned:

  • 3 4.25 L was just enough water for me to cook with and have on the bike ride to and from the campsite when the weather was nice 75f/25c.
  • I need a little camping stool, I got 10 ant bites right on my waist line from sitting on the ground while cooking lol.
  • Using two rocks to prop of my pan over sticks to cook worked surprisingly well but I should probably get a camp stove just in case things get wet or I camp somewhere sticks aren't around
  • The few miles of gravel road SUCKED. I would not recommend anyone ever do something like this on anything smaller than a 32mm tire

Open Questions:

  • What do you do with all of the dew? This time it was easy to put away the tent wet and dry it out at home, but on a multi day trip that wouldn't be an option at all!
  • Do you just deal with everything being wet all of the time?
Sun rise pobscured by partially obscured by trees with a shitty Walmart tent and a decent old bike in the foreground

all 14 comments

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[–] 10 points 1 week ago (7 children)

Fun!! As to your dew question, it really depends on how humid your location is how quickly things will dry out. For backpacking or bike camping, if I'm moving camp, I usually try to clear everything out of the tent as soon as I get up. Take the fly off and hang it on a bush something, in the sun if possible; air out the bottom of the tent as well as you can...all while you're having breakfast etc. Or dawdle about to give everything time to dry out. Otherwise, yeah, it'll stay a little damp. Tents tend to dry quick though, so unless it stays rainy, usually even if you pack it up damp, it'll air out when you set camp the next evening.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (5 children)

    This is why I love hammock camping. Only one damp thing, the rain fly that isn't even attached to anything else. And no dirt or bugs. It's great.

    People ask: how can you sleep like a banana?

    The answer is, you don't go banana. You lay flat. Heck I even sleep on my side. The trick is getting the right hammock (mostly length and width), hanging it correctly (90% of hammocks I see have absolutely the wrong angle, easy fix), and laying in it correctly (feet to one side, head to the opposite side).

    It's my favorite way to camp.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    I do think I'd like to try this some day, only fears I have about it are staying warm and getting changed with some privacy

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago* (1 child)

    Staying warm is easy, again it comes down to the right gear.

    Try to put a sleeping bag inside a hammock and sleep on a cool night, you'll get hypothermia. Know a guy who came real close to that.

    The problem is that the insulation in a sleeping bag is significantly less effective when the air is compressed out of it by the weight of your body pressing it against the hammock. Couple that with the fact that any gentle breeze keeps blowing any escaped heat away from under you and replacing it with fresh cool air, and you start to become what I like to call.. "actively refrigerated" from underneath. It's very unpleasant.

    The solution is what's called an underquilt. It's literally just half a sleeping bag, in the shape of a hammock, with shock cords to hold it snuggly up underneath your hammock. It can't hold any weight, it's just there to be an uncompressed layer of insulation underneath you. And it works great!

    After that, you don't need a sleeping bag inside the hammock, in fact it's unwieldy to get in and out of, and serves no purpose. So you use what's called a top quilt, which is basically just a fancy blanket with an enclosed space for your feet. You can just use a blanket, I have before.

    The changing thing, yeah.. my SO had the same reservations. If you're car camping, you can just bring a little pop up changing room tent thing, goes up and down super easy. It's like a coiled up spring, very cool.

    But if you're in the deep woods by yourself? No need, just change wherever.

    If you're in the deep woods with a group? I always make sure my hammock is on the outside edge of the group, and I change behind it, using the hammock and it's rain fly as a block towards where the people are. Deep woods, so nobody behind you.

    If I found myself in the middle of camp and needed to change, I could just undo the anchors for the rain fly and let it hang straight down around the hammock, then just sneak in between the flaps, and change. Yeah people can see your feet, maybe your ankles, but all other sides are blocked. It's just a bit uncomfortable, but it's not like you're spending all day like that.

    But honestly I'm usually in a group of cis, straight, same gendered people. So unless I'm changing my underwear, I don't bother trying to hide at all, nobody's looking, nobody cares 🤷‍♂️

    Hopefully that helps!

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    • [–] 5 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Beautiful shot! My first trip last year taught me to always bring foot warmers/Toasty Toes and get a warmer sleeping bag.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    Yeah I feel like this "35f/2c" bag is about the limit of what I can use when it's 45f out without needing to wear all of my clothes to bed. Also this was my favorite picture from the trip:

    It was really relaxing to watch the sunrise and watch the water skimmers skirt across the still water

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    • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Nice!

    I bring a special cloth (made to dry off dogs) to wipe down the tent before packing it up. It's super absorbent and I even cut it in two so I can keep one half with my camping gear and the other around the house. I can wipe the whole tent with just wringing it out a few times after full on rain, just for dew you it may even be sufficient with only a super absorbent (scandinavian) dish cloth. Unintuitively you ought to wet and wring those out first to make them more absorbent, that's not necessary with my dog cloth.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 1 week ago

    That's a good idea to bring a small towel or something! I used my shirt that I wore on the way out to wipe off a good chunk of the drew from my bike and bags but it definitely wasn't absorbant enough to do the whole tent in any reasonable amount of time.

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    • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Do you free camp or is this at a camp ground? My problem is there nowhere I can bike to and camp near me.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 week ago

    This was on TVA land at a designated free camp site relatively near me but it was still ~40 miles one way to get out there. If you have any sort of dams near you it is common for them to own the shores of all of the rivers and resiviors and they tend to be pretty permissive with land use especially in the more rural places.

    I didn't think there was anywhere I could bike to and camp near me before I widened the search to include lands that were managed by state-owned enterprises in addition to state parks and national forrests. Sites like freecampsites.net/ are useful but far from exhaustive, and in southern states lean a lot more RV focused in my experience...

    I hope you can find something! It is very therapeutic to be outside on a bike, and doubly so when you get to wake up early and watch the world wake up around you

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