Hey folks, welcome back to the Garage Corner.
I was flipping through a travel magazine over the weekend and I saw an advertisement for a new "outdoor resort" just a couple of hours north of here. They were billing it as the ultimate wilderness escape. Intrigued, I looked at the photos. They didn't show a campground. They showed a wooden platform with a canvas dome tent the size of a duplex. Inside, there was a king-sized mattress, a velvet sofa, a crystal chandelier, and a freestanding porcelain bathtub.
They call it "glamping." Glamorous camping.
Folks, if your tent has a chandelier and a plumbing bill, you aren't camping. You’re just sleeping in a hotel room that has a really bad insulation problem.
Whatever happened to the simple, rugged joy of pitching a pup tent?
We have become so soft that we can’t even go into nature without bringing the entire department store with us. The modern idea of roughing it involves a portable Wi-Fi hotspot, an electric cooler plugged into a generator, and a memory foam mattress that requires a heavy-duty air compressor just to inflate. I see people rolling into state parks with trailers packed so tightly with gadgets that they look like they’re evacuating a natural disaster rather than spending a weekend in the woods.
When you cushion yourself from nature with that much luxury, you miss the entire point of going outside.
Camping isn't supposed to be convenient. It’s supposed to be a deliberate break from our climate-controlled, button-pushing lives. It’s about the raw, visceral experience of testing yourself against the elements. It’s the satisfaction of clearing a patch of dirt, driving stakes into the earth with a mallet, and knowing that your shelter for the night exists purely because of your own two hands.
When you sleep on the ground—with just a thin foam pad and a sleeping bag—you hear the woods wake up. You hear the wind rustle the pines, you smell the damp earth, and you appreciate the warmth of a real wood fire. You eat food cooked out of a cast-iron skillet that tastes better than any five-star restaurant meal because you earned it after a long day on the trail.
Our ancestors crossed this continent with nothing but canvas bedrolls and a pack mule. They didn't complain about the lack of a charging station for their tablets. They developed grit because they embraced the discomfort.
When we turn the wilderness into a luxury boutique experience, we aren't connecting with nature. We're just treating the great outdoors like a background prop for a social media photo shoot. We are trading the genuine humility of being small in a vast forest for a high-end weekend of pampering.
So here is my challenge for you before the summer ends: leave the luxury gear in the closet. Don’t book the canvas dome with the heated floors. Go find an old, simple two-person pup tent. Pack a flashlight, a sleeping bag, a box of matches, and a good knife. Drive out to a state park, hike a mile into the woods, and set up camp the old-fashioned way. Let yourself get a little dirty, let your back ache a little bit in the morning, and reconnect with the real world.
Let's drop the glamour and bring back the camp.
Until next time, keep your pack light, your fire hot, and your shelter simple.
(Just thinking outside the box folks, for the sake of this article. I actually am a big fan of glamping!)
