Linda Hamilton - Camping Activity Book for Families: The Kid-Tested Guide to Fun in the Outdoors

Linda Parker Hamilton is the author of the Falcon Guides Best Hikes Near San Francisco, Hiking the San Francisco Bay, and Camping Northern California. She has written, edited, and published over twenty exciting histories, biographies, memoirs, and family histories for her business Stories to Last, including Chasing Spring about resilience, beauty, and escape from Nazi Germany. She has also written numerous stories for magazines, newspapers, and websites, including American Heritage of Science & Technology, the San Francisco Chronicle, California Magazine, and the Library of Congresss site for children and families: AmericasStory.gov. Prior to all this she worked inthe travel tech industry and taught public school for ten years. Linda is also a singer songwriter. She lives with her husband and two sons, Ben and Max, in Oakland, California.

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Copyright 2016 Linda Hamilton

Illustrations by Rachel Riordan Rowman & Littlefield

All photos by the author unless otherwise noted

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

ISBN 978-1-4930-1334-0 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4930-1335-7 (e-book)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

A ll my best memories of child-hood are outdoor adventures with my family, mostly day hikes among the pine and fir trees, granite boulders, mountain springs, and July wild-flowers of the Eastern Sierras. On the trail to Thunder Mountain, where the Indian caves offered no fewer than five echoes reverberating off the rock face, we would stop for a snack in a meadow of lupine and mountain daisies. My mother would read aloud to us as we lay on our backs chewing grass and watching the floating, ever-changing menagerie of clouds in the blue sky. We sang songs in harmony as we walked. Edelweiss, the Country Marching Song, Kookaburra, and An Austrian Went Yodeling were a few of the regulars. It was on a crimson mountain evening my dad taught me to play cribbage, and on another when I finally triumphed over him. On Silver Lake I learned to skip rocks, to turn my small hands into a water pistol, to fish, to paddle a canoe, to catch a crawdad, and once I created a ladybug hospital out of the tackle box when the surface of the water was covered with them.

Back home my parents had their routines, their weekend tennis matches. My brother and I had our homework and baseball practices. At home the television came on in the evening, and all conversation ended. In the mountains we talked.

I learned about my parents childhoods. We laughed together. We did activities together. We shared lazy afternoons reclining with hors doeuvres and watching aspen leaves dance and the sun shimmer on the lake.

Now that Im a parent myself, I try to regularly set aside time away from our hectic schedule to create moments like these and take my kids out into nature. Camping can be a great time for family. In the outdoors you have the opportunity to be with one another in a meaningful way that can be hard to re-create at home in the everyday land of work and obligations, electronic entertainment, and society. While camping or even staying in a rustic cabin, you can be active and present: hiking, biking, fishing, swimming, and exploring the environment inall kinds of ways. You can relax in a hammock or camp chair, listen tothe world around you, and let your thoughts wander. You can breathefresh air and engage in life in its basics: Prepare food simply, set up your own home away from home,and feel a sense of belonging withnature and the people around you. This is the stuff of treasured, lifelong memories.

But sometimes it can be a struggle to engage the kids in experiencing the world around them. Sometimes we find ourselves tangledin tent poles wondering how to have the kids help but not get in the way. Sometimes we want to reconnect our busy family, but it just isnt happening. Sometimes we have a reluctant camper. And sometimes we just want to add a little more fun.

The Camping Activity Book for Families: The Essential Guide to Fun in the Outdoors will help you do all these things and have a darn good time doing it. The goal is to help families get the most out of camping and being in the outdoors, to have fun and discover new things about nature and one another while creating cherished memories. Camping trips are going to get better than ever!

The best part? A lot of the activities in here dont have to be done just while camping, so even when youre home you can continue the fun and sharing and make more memories!

T his book is designed to be a handy guide to making your family camping experience extra fun. Read this at home before you leave, and bring it with you to use during your trip. Choose activities that appeal to you. Have family members choose something that appeals to them. You might ask older kids to take charge of certain activities (for example, leading a game to keep everyone occupied while youre making lunch, or even helping to make lunch for everyone). Put younger children in charge of picking one family activity for each day or collecting the rocks and sticks needed for an activity. Follow the easytoread instructions, or let the games and crafts spark your own creativity.

The first couple of chapters provide advice on planning your trippreparing, packing, getting the kids excited, and setting everythingup for a successful outing with the family. Chapter three focuses on the most popular family outdoor pastime that will likely be your main activity each day, from hiking to birding to fishing. This isnt a how to guide for each activity, but youll find ideas for making sure each planned activity is as successful and family friendly as it can be. After that youll find tons of ideas on howto keep everyone engaged during the natural ups and downs of the day, with chapters on ways to explore and be active in nature, games you can play outdoors, outback arts and crafts projects, and favorite camp songs to sing. You can find quiet time activities, energy busters, solo activities, and recommended ages for fun and games of all kinds in the Activity Finder at the end of the book. Of course, each child and family is unique, so use this as a general guide. You know your kids best.