Daily Routine / Organizing all of the Supplies
I thought it might be a cool idea to make a separate post about our morning routine, and some helpful things we have learned along the way. Molly and I have both gotten in the habit of setting up the tent FAST. We know where the tent is in the car, know how it goes together, and all-in-all it takes about 3 minutes from start-to-finish. Inside the tent, we have created a little “home” each night.
We start by setting up the tent, then spreading the two small sleeping pads that we have across the bottom of the tent. Molly’s fleece blanket goes down next, then an opened 45 degree sleeping bag acts as our bottom layer. On top of that, we put my brown fleece (from the living room – sorry mom), then the Indian quilt/blanket that we bought in New Mexico, and then finally the spread-out 25 degree sleeping bag. This way, each of us can add/remove layers throughout the night as we get hot or cold. It also helps to have a long-sleeve jacket inside the tent, because I find myself wearing it at night, and taking it off when the sun wakes me up in the morning. We have slept very comfortably this way, and stayed as warm/cool as we like.
In the morning, we wake up and it’s instantly time to tear down the tent. We each go to work. We take out the small things in the tent – water bottles, headlights, knife, keys, etc, and set them aside. Then we pull out the blankets, one-by-one, fold them and place them on the hood. Next we roll up the sleeping pads, and put those on the hood too. The tent is next – we don’t bother with rolling it up – we just stuff it into the bag in the reverse order (tent poles in first, then rainfly, then tent body). That way, when we go to unpack it, it comes out in the order that it is assembled.
Now we have everything torn down and atop the car’s hood or roof.
Everything has its place, although if you were looking inside the car, you’d be lost. I’ll try to explain our organizational system now:
In the trunk:
We managed to fit some things where the spare tire goes: a jack stand, a breaker bar (for working on the car), and a bottle jack.
Against the back of the trunk, we have the thing we will use least often: the climbing harnesses and shoes, climbing rope and carabiners, hiking packs, and rollerblades. In front of that, we have (from left to right) – the slackline, the webbing and carabiners for the hammock / solar shower, the “outdoor box” – (water purifier, small backpacking stove / gas, small titanium cooking pot, fire tinder, matches, etc), the “kitchen box” – (detergent, scrubber, gloves, pot, skillet, plates, cups, utensils, oil, cutting board, knife, foil, spatula, etc), behind the kitchen box we have a box full of propane gas, then next to the kitchen box we have the 2-burner Coleman stove, outdoor tarp, day-packs, and shoes. We have room on top of all of this to store our pillows, sleeping bags, one sleeping pad, and the blankets / “corn husk jackets” (this is what Molly calls our Mexican-looking jackets; she thinks they smelled like corn husks when we first bought them). So if you can visualize all of this, you will know that our trunk is packed full but everything has its place.
The back seat area of the car is full as well, but it is organized. Behind the driver, we have our first-aid box (emergency blankets, band-aids, medicine, etc), and we have a box of chargers / batteries on top of that, then a box of frequently used first-aid box supplies (toothbrushes / toothpaste / Dr. Bronner’s soap, Q-tips, etc), then the pamphlet box. On the seat behind the driver, we have the cooler, and next to the cooler we have the food box. We usually lay the solar shower on top of the cooler when it’s full.
Behind the passenger, we have two 2-gallon Rubbermaid water containers, which we try to keep cool, and a spare quart of motor oil. We keep the tent and the other sleeping pad directly behind the passenger’s seat, horizontally. In the seat behind the passenger’s seat, we have our two suitcases stacked on top of each other, which contain all of our clothes. We stack the two camping chairs on top of these suitcases. Then our dirty clothes bag, Molly’s backpack, and my day-pack are squished in the remaining space. We have spare shoes behind the center console.
Sorry if all of this doesn’t make much sense. I will supplement them with pictures. I guess the point was that everything has its place, and we had to do a bunch of trial-and-error to figure out what we needed most often and where to place it. I think we finally have it perfected!