Camping is a great way to spend some quality time away from the hustle and bustle of the city and the travails of routine life. You get to breathe in the fresh air and also have friends and family around who for once are not preoccupied with their phones, thanks to the poor mobile phone reception in the boonies.
The proverbial question is how long you would keep talking to each other or staring away at the natural surroundings. You will ultimately reach a point where you will feel bored and want some new, fun, and interesting camping activities for adults.
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What Can You Do When Camping?
Have you decided to go camping but don’t know what to do? If you need suggestions for cool and fun things you could do on your camping trip, the following is our list of 10 recommendations.
Setting Up A Campfire
Building a campfire seems like the most obvious thing to do when you’re camping, and most people would refrain from viewing it as a camping “activity”. However, those people who have actually put together the wood needed for the fire would tell you that it takes time and effort to set things up. If there are multiple people lending a hand, the work not just gets easy and quick, but the entire undertaking also turns out quite fun.
To add an element of primitiveness to the activity, make your own feather sticks and bow drills and try and start a fire without matches or a lighter.
Building A Shelter
Like making your own fire, building your own tent or shelter is a great camping activity for adults. Building a shelter can take even more time than creating a campfire and could be great fun if it’s done as a team. When making your tent, make sure you are not just protecting or covering yourself from the sides and top but also insulating the ground. You could lose a significant amount of heat if the surface inside the tent is cold.
Campfire Cooking
Campfire cooking is a recipe for great memories you could reminisce about in the future. Since you won’t have all the tools of a full-fledged modern kitchen handy while camping, it’s advised you do not complicate things. In other words, stick to simple cooking. Hobo meals, hot dogs, etc. would be great things to prepare. They would not just be simple and quick to make but will also be quite delicious.
Make sure you do not completely rely on wood, fire, and other natural items for cooking. Pack some cookware also to speed up and simplify your cooking process. A Dutch oven, for instance, would do the trick. If you are a BBQ lover, add a campfire grate to your list of camping equipment and essentials. Cook chicken, veggies, and burgers directly over the fire using the grate.
Sharing Stories
No location can be as fitting as a camping site for some scary stories, adventure tales, and funny anecdotes. If it’s nighttime, ghost stories can truly set the mood. These scary stories could be your personal experiences, stories you heard from other people or plots picked up from a thriller movie or documentary you saw last night.
In case you run short of stories or the people in your group don’t have many stories to share, download a podcast or audiobook on your mobile device and play the file for everyone to listen and ponder. Do this beforehand, of course, as you may not have an internet connection in the woods.
A portable Bluetooth speaker would come in extremely handy so that you need not strain too much to listen to the speaker. Make sure the podcast stories you pick are interesting enough or you’ll risk putting people to sleep or boring them outright.
Playing Games
After having shared all the best camping jokes and caught up with other campers, you may very soon end up with nothing to do. Games will keep you engaged and help liven up things. Games during camping are not just for kids. There are several camping games that adults can play too. When it comes to the kind of games you could play, there is no scarcity of options.
You can categorize games based on the time of the day. During the day, you could play more physical games or games that entail moving or running around. The kind of game you play would vary based on the physical space available.
For instance, if the place is not wide open, you probably can’t play frisbee. If you’re considering playing volleyball, there are portable nets with their stands that can be set up within minutes.
After sunset, play games that require you to congregate and relax. The games could be verbal or conversational in nature, entail enacting and singing, etc. Games such as who am I?, song game, make me laugh, detective riddles, truth or dare, charades, two truths and a lie, etc. require little to zero movements.
‘Two truths and a lie’ can be extremely fun and also enlightening. You may come to know new things about people you thought you knew everything about.
Card and board games make great camping activities for adults. In fact, a playing card stack must be on your list of campsite necessities next to food, water, and toilet paper!
Foraging
Searching for wild edibles such as nuts and berries can be quite a fun and exciting task. Before you get started with the activity, make sure you have a proper field guide handy. Without a proper plan or not being aware of your surroundings, you might end up spending hours finding nothing at all.
If you end up amassing a good number of edibles, you could use them for your novel wild green salad. If foraging is on your mind, be sure to pack a salad dressing in your bag so that your salad in the wild tastes like one.
Whittling
Making things while camping can be fun. You could, in fact, make multiple things in the woods. You would just need a sharp knife and some blocks of wood. Get started by making pegs for your own tent. If you had plans to build before you embarked on your trip, you need not bring your own tent pegs.
Whittling and shaping a walking stick is another thing you could do. If you’d like to get a little more advanced, you can even make a hook to catch fish. By making these hooks, you are not just keeping yourself engaged but also equipping yourself with a tool to help provide food for a meal.
Fishing
Fishing, as mentioned earlier, is fun and also gets you food. Make sure you know the local fishing guidelines and regulations before you set out fishing. Most importantly, confirm if there are fishing sites near your camping area and the kind of fish you could catch.
Since you need specific fishing gear and you cannot make them all by hand during camping, make sure you don’t pack fishing equipment only to realize in the end that fishing is not an option.
Also, be sure to have your fishing license handy.
Talk with the locals and ask for tips and advice if you are serious about this activity. Ask family and friends about the area if they live in or near the place or have any exposure to the region.
For a fun and safe fishing experience, have bug repellents and sunscreen always within reach.
Reading a Book
Not all camping activities need to be group-based. There are certain things you could do for self-entertainment. For instance, during nighttime when every other member in the group is enjoying their shut-eye and you’re feeling like you have just woken up, reading a book is something you could do to while away time. You may even fall asleep while reading, which makes book-reading a natural sleeping aid too. In case you don’t end up sleeping, you would have at least spent your awake time productively.
Reading books could also be a group activity, but it would be appealing only if others in the group enjoy reading or are at least inclined to it. Reading books in the dark can be quite tricky due to poor visibility. You may, therefore, download an e-book on your mobile device and read it offline. If you want to read from an actual book, carry a headlamp and some extra batteries for the lamp.
Taking Pictures
Camping can be a truly unique vacation and it’s only natural that you capture those memorable moments and have them documented. Through pictures, try telling the entire story of your trip, starting from tent-building to deconstructing everything and heading back home. Look to capture important moments and details you come across during the trip.
The details could be found in the natural surroundings and also the things you do. The food you prepared and ate, the hikes you took, the games you played, the arrows you shot, etc. can all make for great camping pictures. Not to mention, photography can be extremely engaging and fun.
If you’re seriously considering photography during camping, carry a proper camera. Though you could use your smartphones, the pictures they take would not match the quality apparent in the images produced by a DSLR and mirrorless cameras out there.
Photography gear matters. When you look at the pictures a few years later, you would be glad that you captured those moments with a dedicated camera.
