Camping / Roleplaying the End of the World With 4000 Other People
Just after my trip to New York City I thought to myself about a vacation that would be the complete opposite of a trip to New York City.
Not because I didn’t have fun, but because variety is the spice of life. Also, Tiff has never been camping.
We’ve been pretty dedicated “it just makes more sense to get a hotel or a cabin” folk, but dang: between the rent crisis and 100% inflation that’s starting to get less and less practical.
I camped a lot as a child, like, for multiple weeks every summer. It was the vacation of choice for the thrifty.
Now, my experience of camping is pretty simple:
- Camping is mostly CapEx (capital expenditure) with actually pretty minimal OpEx (operational expenditure): most of the equipment you buy is reusable trip-to-trip, and the point costs of camping are low and marginal - campsites tend to run low-double-digit dollars to rent per night, and most of the cost (outside of food that you probably would have bought anyways) is for fuel to get to and from campsites and fuel to expend at campsites.
- However, some camping solutions (trailers, RVs, for example) have quite high CapEx: after spending five figures on camping kit, you need to go on dozens of vacations to break even against hoteling, which very much restricts the kind of vacation you can go on.
- Also: if you live in any kind of strata-managed property, parking a trailer is likely to be a manner of some contentiousness.
- Also also: my car has a tow capacity of “please don’t” and handles like a particularly slow brick/minivan crossover when it’s completely empty.
- The BC Campsite reservation system is a borderline nightmare, and is one of the larger barriers to entry. The problem is not campsite prices but actually getting a campsite at campsite prices.
- However, I’m told that with excellent timing (set a timer for 7AM, 4 months exactly before you plan to camp) and/or mid-week date flexibility (Wednesday is available: Saturday is not), this is surmountable.
- Once camping: I mostly stay at camp. Not much of a hiker, or a kayaker, or a lake-goer-inner.
- I like to read, doodle, listen to music at a respectable volume, eat prepacked snacks, and play board and card games, (which are mostly things I could have also done inside), and are somewhat less comfortable and convenient to do in the outdoors.
- I do not enjoy mosquitos, or the presence of mosquitos.
- Tiffany is so afraid of spiders. You guys. You can creep her out by saying the word “spider” and she’ll immediately be like “where?”
- One time I saw a loose hair on Tiffany while she was outside and I said “hold still” and she said “IS THERE A BUG ON ME?” and her eyes became wide as saucers.
- I very much avoid long drives, as any time I’m behind the wheel for more than 2 hours the act of being forced to pay attention to the same monotonous thing for a really long time exhausts all of the extremely limited dopamine reserves in my brain and I start to collapse in upon myself like a dying star.
- Most of my worst bad mental health moments have been after long, monotonous instances of travel.
- Trying to convince Tiff to learn to drive so that I can split this up somewhat has gone (checks notes) nowhere.
- I am allergic to 25% of the things that are outside (“most trees”, “dogs”) and have to be on a pretty potent dosage of allergy medicine not to immediately die.
- Adventurous pets enjoy camping very much. (Zapp would probably do pretty well on a trip like this, and it’s one of the few kinds of journey where we CAN take Zapp)
- Optimal temperature is 15-20C, mildly overcast.
- June/September are the best months for this?
- Getting up in the middle of the night, having to get dressed and put on shoes, to walk into the forest to pee? Don’t care for that at all.
- actually this is less of a concern now that I generally sleep in pyjamas and a t-shirt, toss a little thingie of hand sanitizer and a headlamp next to my shoes and I’m good to go
- I generally sleep very well while camping.
- Successfully camp cooking, and drinking a coffee on a crisp morning outdoors is very rewarding.
- Camping near friends is a superior experience:
- The cooking is logistically complicated and it becomes less so if you’re doing it for more people at the same time.
- Board games are better if you can round up 3-5 people for them.
- You are less subsceptible to the “whoops I forgot crucial object X” failure condition if multiple redundant parties are packing their own kit.
pictured: one (1) adventure cat
Camping v. Gear
So I walk away from this wondering if I’m more interested in camping or simply the enjoyable activity of shopping for gear.
Gear is neat. I can learn what the “best” tent is, and watch people review that tent, on YouTube. I can get weird with it and test out weird and estoteric gear. I love gear. I’m a gear-enjoyer. Camping is a fun project for the gear-minded because it makes every element of the process a fresh gear-based decision.
Do I need to set up a solar power station? No. Do I want to? Absolutely yes.
Hell, there’s a bunch of stuff I already have, like little telescoping bench circles and USB-powered lanterns, that I want to see how they do… in the outdoors. (It turns out that basic “responsible adult” emergency kit stuff and camping gear enjoy a lot of overlap.)
One of the ways I try and resolve this for myself is: if I had to camp with someone else’s kit and it had most of the stuff I needed, would I still want to do it?
And the answer is… 55% yes, I think. I’d need to have some good experiences to get that number up.
The Wasteland Beckons
We Roleplayed the End of the World with 4000 Other People
So, Quinns went to Wasteland Weekend, a festival in the Mojave Desert where a bunch of folks just pretend to be Mad Max for several days.
Between Quinns’ expert reportage and a bit of my own research, it seems like Wasteland Weekend - and its Cyberpunk sister event, Neotropolis, are sort of a mix of “Burning Man”, “Ren Faire”, and “COSPLAY”.
(I like the Cyberpunk one more, although Tiff is more on team Mad Max)
Which, uh, honestly? I’ve always thought the idea of a Ren Faire is cool, but practically I’m just not that big a fan of the medieval aesthetic.
That actually looks like … fun. I would go to that. I miss festivals like Pax, and “outdoors” and “mask easily worked into theme” actually significantly reduces the microbiological event risks.
Except, the logistics. The logistics of going to such an event are complicated.
Quinns managed to go home to a hotel every night of the wasteland weekend, but the nearest hotel is a 20 minute drive away by car and I doubt anybody’s Ubering to the middle of the desert. How did he get back and forth to the event? Did he rent a car? How easy is it to get your deposit back after driving a car on unpaved Mojave roads for a week? Cars coming and going also have to go through the entire entry process every time, so you’re going to want to minimize comings and goings.
Once you’re in, it’s a desert event with minimal food and drink so it’s advised that you pack food. Okay, so, are you going to bring a cooler and a camelbak with you on the plane? That’s going to call for some checked luggage.
Which brings us back to… camping.
Camping is included with the cost of the event ticket. If you WANT to pitch a tent out in the Mojave you can, giving you maximum event access.
So in order to bring your own gear to that, you’d need to drive, and the drive from here to there is… 22 hours?
I very much avoid long drives
That’s the sort of drive I’d do across 3 days, even: 6 hours to Portland, 6 hours to Redding, 8 hours to the Mojave, heck - even a 4th day to pad that a little more maybe. So now it’s a 5 day event with 7 additional days of travel time. That doesn’t sound toooooo bad although I’d much rather do that with a driving partner than alone.
And… this is desert camping, not BC camping. It’s Burning Man rules, where you’re expected to truck out your grey water and there are no showers or potable water anywhere. Dust gets everywhere, you need to invest in much longer, deeper stakes and weights so that the wind doesn’t carry your gear away, and you have to be prepared for some potentially pretty wild temperature fluctuations.
Oh, and while travelling with Zapp for a short outdoor adventure sounds fun, travelling with him for 12 days across a very long distance sounds distinctly less fun. On top of that, if we’re busy with a festival, he’s likely to spend a lot of time alone in a scary desert tent, which sounds distinctly less :cat: than hanging out with his family in a big fun forest.
The Unfortunate Conclusion
All that is to say: as much as I think it looks cool to go do a wasteland or cyberpunk festival out in the middle of the desert, I don’t think I’m quite ready yet, or likely to take on that project in the near future.
I think that it would probably be a lot easier to go to, like, Magwest or Pax and stay at a hotel. If I want to level up my camping ability a bit, it’s a lot more practical to do that near home.
(2025 Editor’s note: just about every Canadian is now boycotting travel to the increasingly fascist state to our south, so now definitely not)