Background:
My wife and I love to camp. In years past we owned a motorhome, but fuel bills made lengthy adventures unfeasible. In 2007 I built a small teardrop-esque camper
http://www.tnttt.com/viewtopic.php?f...=canoe#p227334 that we have drug all over the southwest and back and all over our home state of Missouri. We managed to average 19 mpg pulling it with a KIA Sportage. Well that Sportage is long gone and the one that replaced it is long enough in the tooth that I didn't feel comfortable setting out on such a long journey with it.
We plan to retire fairly early and to accomplish that we are going to have to live modestly in retirement. We hope to travel the country in a fashion that won't break the bank. We decided to give hammock camping a try.
Typically we make an annual trip to Puerto Penasco, Sonora, Mexico for a concert. In the past we have always flown into Phoenix and rented a car for the four hour drive to Penasco. This year we wanted to spend a little more time down there and wanted to see some more of the desert southwest so we decided to drive and hammock camp. Here are some of the hammock-related highlights. I won't dwell much on the sightseeing that we did or this will be crazy long.
Our equipment:
We didn't anticipate having much in the way of trees to hang our hammocks from once we got past Oklahoma so we figured we would need some sort of free standing stand. Well I purchased several hammocks from dejoha thinking I could experiment with different models to find something that suited me (same goes for my wife). He had a Mayan woven hammock listed at the same time but it was spoken for before I got to it. I was intrigued by that so I hunted another one down and purchased it and a metal, collapsible stand from a web site called swings-n-things. That hammock is awesome. Not something I would necessarily want to camp in, but I love to lounge in it while watching tv or...wait, I digress. Anyway, I tried out all of my hammocks in the metal stand and it worked very well with all of them-so well that I bought another stand for us to use on our trip. They are heavy and a little bulky, but that wasn't really an issue for us since we never camped far from the car.
Mine:
Trek Light Single hammock
Vivere hammock stand
Cabelas tarp
Arrowhead Eq/Kick *** Quilt (Jarbridge river)
Hammock Bliss no-see-um net
El Cheapo Wal Mart synthetic mummy bag (didn't want anything worth too much in anticipation of lots of sand and sweat)
Hers:
Trek Light Double (she preferred the lay of this one over the single-I liked them both equally)
Vivere hammock stand
Grand Trunk AT convertible usd as a tarp
same underquilt, bug net and mummy bag
Here's a picture of our camp on the first night:
We camped at Red Rock Canyon state park near Hinton , OK. While we had spent several nights in the hammocks indoors, I did not have an opportunity in the days leading up to the trip to pitch the tarps or even make use of the bug nets. We arrived after dusk so I got to do all of that for the first time by headlamp. It turned out not to be a big deal. Everything worked great and we had a good night's sleep. We have hiked all of the trails in this park in the recent past, so we just cooked breakfast and left early the next morning, heading west.
Night two, Guadalupe Mountains National Park.
Ah, the wonderful, marvelous lack of humidity. I should mention that my wife and I both suffer from food and environmental allergies. One of the reasons we love camping in the southwest so much is the fact that none of our environmental allergens are around in the desert. We can both breath easily and she can forego her daily antihistamines.
Unfortunately for us, we got to experience the bulk of the Guads' annual rainfall that night. The campground was situated on a hilltop (surrounded by mountains) and there was enough lightning that we didn't feel comfortable hanging in between two lightning rods so we bugged out to our car until is passed. The winds were strong enough to drag the 50 pound rocks that I had attached our tarp guys to and in one instance the dragging rock rubbed through the guy rope. our bedding got pretty soaked. Fortunately it was warm and our bedding dried out a lot by morning. As a side note, the campground was full of sleeping bags hung out to dry the next day, so the tent campers didn't fair any better than we did.
Well, I am going to stop here for now and continue later with another installment.
KS
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