Hello all! Short time lurker, first time poster. Name is Nick and I am from the Sebago Lake Region up here in Maine.
I've always enjoyed the outdoors, and have done a number of car camping trips over the years. However, after a few trips this year where we (wife and I) tried to 'get away from the crowd' and ended up next to a bunch of load and disrespectful 'kids' in a number of campgrounds we have decided that we need to actually get into the middle of nowhere for some peace and quiet.
I've spent the past year slowly getting together the gear required for some backpacking adventures and am getting close to having all the bare necessities. Having never done true backpacking/camping before it's taken a bit of time and a lot of research helped by this forum (and watching lots of Shug's videos!) to get going. The big ticket items I've gotten this year so far are my Roaming Gnome hammock(!), Kelty Down 20 sleeping bag, and the Incubator 0 thats in the mail now! I also got a MadCat tarp as well as a large Kelty 12 tarp too.
The reason for the sleeping bag (vs top quilt) and Kelty tarp is that we will still be doing some ground dwelling in the future and those both work well (in my testing so far) as good substitutes for the lighter weight hammock specific items. I am trying to convince the misses to come to the dark side and get off the ground but it's still a work in progress for now. She likes to cozy up in a tent, but if I can get her to try out a good hammock setup I do not think it will be much of an effort to convince her. I am 'taking one for the team' and testing things out first to figure it all out before committing on that though.
I'll be spending a bit of time in the yard for test runs this winter and hopefully I'll be able to actually get out there and do some exploring soon. Luckily my 'yard' is really just a lot of woods and offers a lot of good testing sites!I spent my first full night out in the hammock this past weekend with my sleeping pad and sleeping bag and slept pretty well, but can't wait till the Incubator shows up! Only really woke up when a noisy fox started barking at me because I was in his space. After that I felt a little bit of chill but was certainly tolerable. Was down in the 30s at least (warm for this time of year up here).
Anyways...that was bit of a rambling intro! Really just wanted to say hi and that hope to learn a lot more from the forums and to share my adventures as well!
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