My Annual "camp more this year" lecture ;-) - Time, Life and Money

There is a very special camping spot with a lot of petroglyphs nearby. Sometimes I set there among them just trying to imagine what might have been swirling around in the heads of those who created them. I must confess to some degree of envy toward the seemingly simpler lifestyle our ancestors must have enjoyed. No mortgage, no credit card payments due, no rising gas price straining the budget.....etc.

 

Looking at petroglyphs is the daytime version of gazing at the stars. ( That would make them earthly constellations, so to speak. )

There is a good book called "How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life" by Alan Lakin. Perhaps the most important point within it is that time and life are effectively the same thing. With time we do all other things including making money. While it might be true that time and money are the same thing in a business sense, may I suggest that it is not true in a personal sense because once all your time is gone, all the money in the world doesn't do you any good. We really spend our lives on a money vs time 'titer tauter' so to speak. In effect we work more, in an effort to make more money. Ironically, we think the more money we make, the more time we will have to do the things we really want to do. In other words, spend more time making more money so we can have more time??? What's wrong with this picture??? Perhaps the big mistake is orienting our lives around our work. After all time is our most valuable possession as it is life itself. Additionally, good health is the thing that gives you the ability to enjoy your time. ( People in pain and the sickly can't enjoy their time. ) Thus he who has both time and health is truly among the 'richest' of people. Let me suggest, that this year you try making your life's schedule around your recreation instead of your work. How does one do this you ask? Planning.

Our camping planner/calendar will aid a great deal toward that end. Be sure to download our 2010 version if you haven't already done so. ( I hope you find the included cookbook useful too.)

Alternately, you can make your own calendar using your own pictures at this Calendar Projects wiki web site. They have many different options for making your own. Then after you have a calendar, the drill becomes planning out those camping trips you have always wanted to do. Plan your recreation time carefully for it is the true gold of your life. You might what to do a little research at this point. You know, Goggle a few camping spot possibilities and such. One great way to research an area is to subscribe to local or state publications from the given area. For example, anyone planning a trip through Arizona might find a $21.00 subscription to Arizona Highways Magazine to be the best camping investment they ever made. After all that magazine uses professional photographers and writers to illustrate and describe the choices locations in the state. Once you have your camping trips worked out, now comes the hard part - you have to stick to your guns and make them happen. Now if all this has a 'deja vu' feel to it, it's because we really have been here before. Remember how we started last year? This year try planning your life around the things you want to do not the things you have to do. Guard your recreation time as though it is your most valuable possession - it is! Time is life and money is only the middle man. Have you been paying him a little too much?

Let's make this a great camping year. Go Camping!

Ken

Goodbye 2008 - Hello 2009

Happy New Year everyone!

Seems like I just blinked my eyes and yet another year slipped into the archives of my memory banks. And what a year it was ( Yikes! :-0 ) filled with meltdowns, collapses and bailouts. The word that most describes 2008 to me, though, is "unprecedented". At least that’s the word the political and media arenas have latched on to. I heard a CNN anchor say "unprecedented unemployment numbers" followed by "not since the seventies". It would be nice if reporters would have to know the meaning of the words they choose to use. Allow me to suggest to you that there is nothing unprecedented here. It has all happened before in one form or another, to one degree or another, at one time or another, by one people or another.

Notwithstanding all those dire ‘unprecedented’ predictions, we have before us a nice, bright, shinny, pristine new year. And January is the time to reflect on what has been and plan for what will be. May you find a way to let the hope of what could happen overpower the fear of what might happen and inspire your will to drive what does happen in 2009! ( Have you ever noticed how hope and fear tend to go together? )

Here is my sophisticated two part 2009 plan for addressing the possibility of these impending dire times.

1- Keep plugging away.
2- Go camping!

Part one of this plan is perhaps more involved than might seem at first glance. It will involve new videos, new products, regular newsletters ( this is where hope over powers fear ), free ideas, revitalized and new blogs, the introduction of "some assembly required" products, a new book and the return of kits. I am telling you, with any luck at all, we are going to get our camp kitchens organized beyond our wildest dreams. Why? So we can implement part 2 of the plan.

Go camping! No matter how much of our money the politicians give away or how ‘gloom and doomy’ the predictions of the experts and reporters become, this part of the plan will work perfectly. This is where we welcome meltdowns because it means the cheese has adorn the green chili on our lunch time burger. And the consequences of our collapses means we just didn’t stake the tent well enough to handle the wind gusts. And bailouts are a blessing because that means somebody just caught a monster trout and our boat took on some water in all the excitement.

No matter how good or bad a given year might be, you don’t get a second chance to live it over. Your kids will never be the age they are right now again and neither will you. Let’s get out there and archive those 2009 camping memories. The real beauty of part two of our plan is it doesn’t require the completion of part one. You can do it anytime.

Go camping!

Ken

So this is camping???

I have been wrestling with this whole notion of what the term 'camping' has come to mean and why.

To me, camping is a spirit or maybe even a state of mind that results from the shedding of modern conveniences and distractions and reducing things down to simpler essentials. (The purest form of camping would be backpacking where the object of the game is to have exactly what you need and nothing else.)

Strangely, this process facilitates more of an awareness of ones own existence. The senses become more amplified. The thoughts become less cluttered. It just feels good.

One of the weaknesses of our capitalistic society though, is that marketing tactics tend to pick at our wants and desires and paint magnificent images of the virtues of what we don't have. This in turn drives us to wanting more, more, more which is completely contrary to the aforementioned simplification process. So we go from a tent, to a camper shell, to a tent trailer, to an RV, to a summer cabin etc. and that spirit of camping just gets lost in the clutter. Unfortunately, I'm not sure we realize what's going on or what we are missing.

I talk with folks who tell me things like, "I took my son/daughter camping but they hated it". But then you ask and find out that their son or daughter spent the whole trip with either their IPOD or their cell phone in their ear or they just had to have their best friends along for someone to talk to or they spent the whole trip watching videos or even satellite TV with the generator running outside the RV.

( A very valuable lesson that backpacking has taught me is that things own you as much as you own them. Maybe more, as we may not ever know how much 'things' distract us from who we are . )

I suspect some of you might be thinking I'm being a socialistic hypocrite here. After all I do sell camping products. Actually my point is to maybe, get some discussion going about what camping really is.

Who knows maybe you're missing the whole point......or maybe I'm missing it?

Welcome to the videocamper blog.

The purpose of this blog is to generate camping relevant information in order to promote tent camping, backpacking and other outdoor/wilderness enjoyment activities. It is my intent to have this blog work in conjunction with my two camping related websites:

http://www.blueskykitchen.com/ - where you can find answers to camp kitchen and chuck box concerns and additional general tent camping information.
http://www.camping-tips.com/ - the place for tent camping ideas, tips and tricks.

and my video newsletter:

www.camping-tips.com/newsletter.html - demonstrations of camping techniques and outdoor video.

Basically, I envision content changes on those websites and in the newsletter that would reflect the interest and needs of those of us who tent camp. For example, if folks were looking for a good solution to some particular problem when camping, then the experienced among us could share our ideas on the subject and I would develop a web page to address that particular issue or cover it in the newsletter.

Such issues could also be addressed through posts of other websites they may have already adequately covered the information in question.

That way when the subject comes up again we simple refer people to the appropriate web page instead of having to go through the whole discussion all over again. ( In my opinion, the down side of blogging is the redundancy of topics.)

Please keep your posts relevant to tent camping, backpacking and activities commonly associated with same. Feel free to include your URL in your signature but do not mention your products or services unless they are relevant and specific to the given thread you are posting to. In other words, let's keep it camping relevant! However, feel free to tell us about the bear that raided your last camp or the pack rat that stole your wedding ring or 'the one that got away'. Camping stories are more than welcome!

Hopefully, we will attract some of the scouting communities so lets keep the language and discussion appropriate to all ages and groups.

Thanks for participating!

Ken Ralston
http://www.blueskykitchen.com/
http://www.camping-tips.com/

so many ideas....so little time