Marcelo Calbucci

I rarely write about family adventures on my blog, but I thought I’d share how it was to go camping with Victor (4 year-old) and Daniel (almost 2 year-old) mostly because every one that I know who has kids keeps asking the same questions: how did it go? So a blog post seems appropriate.


We went to Lake Easton State Park, just about 1h from Seattle on Friday afternoon. I picked that spot after checking two dozen other private and public camping sites in a 2h radius from Seattle. My criteria were simple: Not too far (if something goes wrong it’s easy to get back), had something for the kids to do (playground, beach, etc.), the campsites had to be under trees (to protect from sun and rain) and it couldn’t be too close to a lake/river (less worries w/ the kids falling and less wind/cold during the night).

Lake Easton had everything for us. They had a pretty decent beach on the lake with sand, a little playground, grass area for the kids to play, an amphitheater, and more. I knew I had picked the right park as soon as we got there. There were dozens of kids of very young age (2-8) running around, on bikes, scooters, playing ball, walking on the street, etc. If I picked the wrong place for my kids, so did dozens of other families.

The campsites were just exactly what we expected. Notice I never went camping on my life, so I had no clue exactly how things work, except by what I read on the web. We were lucky to have a campsite just about 30 yards from the restrooms. We had a large table and fire pit.

Before we got there

I did a checklist by doing some research and lots of visits to Target, Fred Meyer, REI, Costco and even Wal-Mart. By far, the best place to buy camping gear is Costco. Whatever they have it just buy it. But buy it early in the year (March/April) because they do sell out. They had an amazing tent which it took me too long to buy and they sold out by May. You can’t find everything at Costco, but the price and quality of the products available there beats every other store. The second best place was Fred Meyer. Good variety and good price. Target was so-so, and REI had amazing variety but very expensive.

Since we were going to stay just two nights, I wrote down a simple menu the week before and bought the food. We also checked the weather and it said it would be in the mid-70s to the mid-80s during the day, but that it would go down to mid-50s in the night. So, we packed some extra blankets. We didn’t have sleeping bags. We had one queen-size air-bed for us and two toddler air-bad + sleeping bag combo.

Day 1

As soon as we got there we started to assemble the tent. It was very easy. Inflated the air-beds, set up our “kitchen” and we started exploring the vicinities. Some friends of ours got there a few hours later and we went to their campsite. In the period of 1 hour after that Victor fell playing soccer on gravel and scratched his knees and elbows pretty badly. Shortly after Daniel went after a soccer ball and smashed his face against the cable holding the tent and got a bruise near his cheekbone. Oh well, we are used to that.

I bought a small stove/grill combo and we had hotdogs for dinner. The kids loved eating on the camp and we had marshmallows on the fire pit for dessert. Not need to say we had marshmallows on the fire pit every time it was on. Around 9:30 PM we went to bed. That’s when things got ugly...

It was much colder than we expected, and there was a draft of air coming into our tent through the mesh. Victor had slept on his air-bed before at home, so he did ok. Although he woke up in the middle of the night a couple of times and turned quite a bit. Daniel cried, coughed (I forgot to mention he was sick the week before camping), turned, wanted to get up, didn’t want a blanket and that’s how it went until about 2AM. I couldn’t sleep until 3AM worried if the kids were feeling too cold, if they were comfortable, etc. Then it was 5:40 AM and Daniel decided to wake up. Victor woke up 5 minutes later and instead of good-morning he said “I smell chicken”!

Day 2

Despite feeling a bit tired, the day went great for everyone. More of our friends got there on Saturday. We went to the beach and spent several hours there. The water was too damn cold and not even the kids (who usually don’t care for water temperature) had the courage to get into the water. We played with water balloons, sand, balls, playground, volleyball, did a barbeque (Brazilian style), drunk beer and wine. There were 11 adults and 9 kids. It was fun.

Day 2 was the shower day. We bought the tokens on the change machine (about $0.50 for 3 minutes of hot water). It was a pretty clean and good shower. No complaints there. Just make sure to have several tokens. Nothing worse than running out of hot water while you are still showering.

I went to bed around 9:30 PM, put both kids to sleep and when Daniel tried to negotiate I was direct to the point “lie down and sleep!” He complied. Everyone was sleeping in 5 minutes and contrary to the previous night, and probably because the kids were extra tired; it was mostly an uneventful night.

Day 3

We woke up again around 5:45 AM. Coffee on cold mornings does taste better. We had a slow moving morning eating our breakfast (grilled cheese sandwiches, coffee, cereal bars) and went for a walk to visit our friends. Around 8:30 AM we started packing the car and were done in about 1 hour. By 10:00 AM we headed back home and that was a wrap.

A few thoughts if you are going camping with kids:

• Camping with multiple friends is better for several reasons: 
• If you forget something (on my case olive oil), one of your friends might have brought.
• Kids keeps kids busy, and leave parents free to do stuff
• Wood is great for the fire pit if you are using to keep warm or to do marshmallow, but not so great to grill meat because it’s too hard to control the flames and heat, so charcoal is better on that case.
• You’ll use a lot more wood then you expect. We used about 5 bundles, so it’s better to buy nearby the camping than to carry it with you.
• Kids 3+ might sleep fine on sleeping bags, but very young (1-2) is hard because they move too much. I have good solution for this.
• Lots of band-aids and Neosporin/antiseptic.
• Next time I’ll bring a cooking oil spray for the grill.
• Bring a kettle to warm water for instant coffee or tea, and to warm kids’ milk. The strategy to warm kid’s milk is to boil half the milk and mix it with the other half cold, so the milk gets to the right temperature. The first night I boiled the milk and it took a good hour before it was at a temperature my kids could drink it.
• This is the first time I used Facebook to post pictures as we went. Instead of coming home, download pics, selecting the top 20-30 and uploading, I did it all with my iPhone 4. I wish I could upload videos as well. Someday.