Author: Nancy OBrien

I’ve never been known for having an elephant’s memory. In fact, at the end of my senior year of college, the choir to which I belonged — and for which I was the librarian — gave me an award. I can’t remember the exact title anymore, but it was something along the lines of “Most ditzy.” It was well-earned. To compensate for this lifelong tendency toward forgetting things, I’ve become very good at making myself to-do lists.

So when Greg and I began camping with the kids, I quickly realized that I was going to need some way of keeping track of everything involved in dragging four kids and all of our gear along on a camping vacation. Enter the camping binder (i.e. my camping bible).

This thing has grown and morphed over the years. I couldn’t survive without it, frankly.

My camping binder has everything I need to prepare for a camping trip. The pages are in plastic sleeves because I learned my lesson one day when we were trying to set up in the rain.

Here is how I have it organized, with links to the relevant Word documents, in case you’re interested in the nitty gritty.

• Section 1 is for notes and includes the camper’s specs, blank pages for taking notes while we’re traveling (things to buy when we get home, etc.), vehicle registrations, service records, and Greg’s health summary (in case of a health emergency while we’re away from home).
• Section 2 includes all of our campground reservation confirmations, along with directions to the campgrounds, etc.
• Section 3 has my pre-departure checklist, which details everything I typically need to do before we leave.
• Section 4 is the set-up checklist, which tells us everything we need to do to set up the travel trailer when we get to a campground and, importantly, in what order.
• Section 5 is the tear-down checklist, and again it lists everything we need to do in order. There’s nothing more annoying than locking up the RV and then discovering that the truck keys are still inside.
• Section 6 is the checklist we follow when leaving the camper at the storage facility.
• Section 7 includes all of the checklists I use to plan meals: the grocery list; the meal planning template (for want of a better term); the food packing guide, which helps me remember where all the foods that I need to pack actually are (yes, I really am that scatterbrained!); camping meal ideas; my spice list; and recipes. A lot of this is redundant, but by the time I’ve been through it all, I usually have everything I need.
• Section 8 includes all of the packing lists: Greg’s, Nancy’s, the painting packing list, and the hiking packing list.
• Section 9 is a list of all of the camper’s contents (minus the under-camper storage, which is Greg’s domain). I usually empty out the camper at the end of each camping season, so I need this list to remind myself of everything that needs to go back into it at the beginning of the next season.

Greg and I learned the hard way that we need to use these checklists EVERY TIME we travel with the camper, particularly when setting up and tearing down.

A few years ago we were getting the pop-up ready to take to its next owner. We skipped the tear-down checklist because we’d had the darn thing 15 years by then. Surely we knew how to hitch the popup to our tow vehicle by now? Nope. We forgot to put up the tongue jack before we hopped in the car to drive off. CRACK! Embarrassed, we had to call the new owners to tell them that we needed to repair the popup before we could deliver it.

Ah, those were the days!

My camping binder/bible changes a little each year as our needs change, but it remains an indispensable part of our camping lives.