My youngest (six-year old) is really turning into a partner for getting outdoors. The kid is always down to go for a hike or do anything outside. Not only that, but it is his nature that if you give him an inch, he’ll take a mile. Whenever I suggest something outdoors, he’ll one-up me. Take a walk to the park? => Let’s go on a hike. Go for a hike in the county park five miles away? => Let’s ride our bikes there first.
Somewhere along the way he got in his head that we HAD to go winter camping this year. Now I figure that my boys are old enough that we could handle that, and I figured that we would do it some time this winter. But the chance happened to present itself this weekend, thanks to my youngest.
We normally watch a movie at home on Friday night. I thought that I would add a little bit of camping fun to movie night by suggesting that we camp out in the living room in our sleeping bags. Of course, my youngest raised me and asked if we could set the tent up in the living room. The more I thought about it, the more I kind of wanted to set the tent up in the living room too. But once I had that in my head, I figured that I should re-raise my son and suggest we camp in the back yard. He was so excited!
Now mind you, all of this discussion happened over supper at about 7:00, while my wife just rolled her eyes at us. It actually turned out to be a good night for us to do it, the low for the night was only set to be 30 degrees.
So what did we use for a kit? We used our normal tent (REI Taj 3). We put three sleeping pads down. For the boys, I further put a blanket over their sleeping pads, then their sleeping bags, and another blanket over the top. For myself, I just used my Marmot sleeping bag on top of my Klymit Static V pad. The boys used my Klymit insulated pad and ThermaRest Prolite, respectively.
How did it go? I was pretty pretty warm. The boys were a little cold, but the youngest made it all the way through the night. It was good that we tried out sleeping only a little below freezing in the back yard. Both boys had a positive enough experience that they want to try it again, which is ultimately the goal. Their sleeping bags, which are fine for summer, are probably a little light for winter. Since we pulled this together at the last minute, I just grabbed the first blankets that I saw. With some planning, I could pick some better quilts for them to use which will be warmer.
Once we had the tent packed up and we were back inside, the youngest said, “so when can we go winter backpacking?”