Camping.

I love camping. It is magical. I know many of you probably hate it and when you think about camping you think about being dirty and cold and uncomfortable. You think of sleeping on the ground. But it doesn’t have to be like that, I promise. Here are the secrets to camping well:

1) Embrace the dirt. All the pressure to dress well and shower and wash and dry and curl/straighten your hair in every day life gets exhausting. When you camp, you put on sweats, you wear a hat, and you don’t change your clothes for about 48 hours. Embrace it. It’s a blissful break from daily primping.

2) S’mores must happen. How often do you get to toast marshmallows over the open fire and eat jet-puffed sugar with no guilt? Almost never… unless you go camping. And don’t limit yourself to the traditional graham and Hershey’s s’more. I highly recommend the Ritz + Reese’s s’more and the graham-nutella-banana s’more too.

3) Wool socks are your friend. Whenever we go camping with friends, they always freeze their buns off the first night, while Micah and I are perfectly comfortable. Wanna know why? We wear wool socks to bed. If you wear wool socks, your feet will stay warm, even if it’s below freezing outside. And if your feet stay warm, the rest of your body will feel warm too. That’s just the way it works. We always bring a couple extra pairs of these magical socks and share them with our friends after they have experienced a night without them. You might think this is mean, but we want to them to know the difference so they never go camping without wool companions again.

4) Do not sleep on the ground. Period. Don’t do it. You must separate yourself from the cold hard dirt, both for warmth and so you don’t break your back. Once I went camping with a huge group of friends in December. It was freezing. I slept in a tent with three other girlfriends. One of them had a blow up mattress to share and then there were two spots on the ground. No one wanted to sleep on the air mattress because it meant they would have to sleep on the edge of the tent, which was scary to them for some reason. I waited patiently for them to come to their senses but when no one else volunteered to take the “edge” spot on the bed, I gladly volunteered. The moral of the story is this… I was warm that night and slept like a baby because my body was two feet above the ground. The girls who chose to sleep on the cold, hard, 17 degree earth did not. If you go camping, put anything between yourself and the dirt… a mattress, a foam pad, anything you can find. Micah and I sleep in the bed of his truck. We pull the memory foam and the feather topper and all the bedding off our guest bed and get all cozy in the truck under the open sky. We have never taken a tent camping together and we probably never will. We stay so warm up on the truck far above the ground.

We went camping this weekend with my cousin and her family. This is the second year in a row that we have gone camping up at the Mogollon Rim in October. We drive about two hours out of the city and we find cold air, breathtaking views, roaming Elk and leaves that are changing color. We hiked by Woods Canyon Lake, had a picnic lunch, drank lots of hot chocolate, ate s’mores, and just had a relaxing time in the mountains. Both nights of the trip, I fell asleep under the stars after telling Micah how camping with him is my favorite. And it really is. Use all the secrets above and you will love it too!