Air Mattress With Hole In It

Every season we bring along an air mattress to put in our tent and attempt to relieve the amount of pain in our spine that we get from sleeping on the ground. Typically, the air mattress we bring will have gotten a hole in it last year from our dog, but we always forget about it until our first overnight of the season the following year. It’s a time-honored tradition at this point.

Iodine Tablets and Water Purification System

This is a pretty embarrassing story, but when our buddy was turning 19 we did a nine mile overnight to a lake way out in the backcountry, and all the three of us brought were summer sausages, a ten strip of acid and about a gallon of Wild Turkey 101. 

Halfway through the night we had acid bubblegut mixed with whiskey shits and we didn’t have the mental fortitude or dexterity to make clean drinking water. We mean, you try boiling water with two hits of LSD swirling around in your blood. It was a rough night for us and a hard lesson, but at least we didn’t report our friend as dead. The moral of the story? Bring multiple means to clean your water, because you never know when your buddy who only talks about Billy Strings is going to bust out the good stuff around the campfire. 

Soggy Tortillas At Bottom of Cooler

This is perhaps the most important aspect of camping gear. We not only recommend it, but often think it should be required. Do you know the package of tortillas you buy on your way out to the campsite that then slip and get buried into the bottom of the ice chest under roughly 400 beers, and then you forget about them, and when you come home you go to empty the ice chest and at the bottom, surrounded by melting ice and a few Busch Lights is that pack of unopened tortillas, except water seeped in somehow so they’re just soggier than all get out? Indeed, this camping season, please remember the pack of soggy tortillas. They are paramount to your camping experience.