5 Ways British and American Camping is Very Different
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- Опубликовано: 13 сен 2024
- This past Labor Day weekend, I decided to get away from it all and do what many Americans do at this time of year: pitch a tent at a camp site. While this was largely intended as a mini vacation and not the set-up for a video, I did none-the-less have a lot of thoughts about the ways in which camping differs between Britain and the United States. Here are five of them.
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I’m more afraid of ticks ( with the prevalence of Lyme disease) than the large predators!
Get bit by ticks and suddenly your allergic to meat
@@memesredacted only lone stars, and they are aggressive.
Truth. However, a bite won’t give you Lymes, the tick has to be embedded for a good day to actually infect you. Still, tuck your pants into your socks.
Had a friend that got real bad Lyme disease when he was a kid. Yeah, when out camping you check often.
Permethrin! I buy it by the gallon and spray it on all my gear, clothes and especially shoes and socks. It’s non toxic, lasts on clothes for a few washes, and kills ticks when then touch the cloth
The last time I when camping, My brother and I were sitting around the campfire chat. It was very peaceful. I noted that I was loving this and wonder why I stopped camping (for 30 years) after leaving the Boy Scouts.
Then it start to rain.
"Oh, right. Now I remember why."
My "I remember why" is the insect, particularly spiders. They are veritable BEASTS in the wilderness.
@@donnaguy9057 I had one get stuck up in my pajama leg (the kind with the cuffs) and bit me but good. I had enormous welts for days.
@@daffers2345 LOL "Something bit me" -Forest Gump
i love camping in the rain! as long as you have proper gear. rain means fewer people around and no mosquitos! :D
I've sat around a few campfires, but never heard anyone burst into song. There's usually just a lot of talking, plus people moving their chairs, while stating "smoke follows beauty."
Omgosh, that is so true. 😂🤣😂
You never went camping with my dad. He always brought his guitar. Also, singing songs around a campfire is pretty normal at scout and church camps that I know of.
If you go to girl scout camp, you can't avoid the campfire songs. It's a thing.
@@LoyaFrostwind We were called Girl Guides in Canada and there was always a 4 part round of "Fire's Burning" at some point during the night.
@@jazzybirddesigns I remember one tune that keeps going around on infinite repeat in my mind:
"Wearing my long wing feathers as I fly,
Wearing my long wing feathers as I fly,
I circle around,
I circle around,
The boundaries of the earth,
The boundaries of the sky..."
Wild animals may rarely interact with campers, but it's still hard to fall asleep while listening to a mountain lion scream
Half asleep at 2am yesterday. In my bedroom. An elk bugled under my window and I sat straight up. Who needs camping, I don't need no stinking camping. 😁
Camped with my four youngest grandkids in the back yard last week. Between the barred owls at night, and the rooster across the street, I got about an hour of sleep. The kids, and Ernie the cat, (who also lives across the street) all slept soundly🙄
😂💗
You put yourself through it for love. You're an awesome grandma.
I love that Ernie joined you all.
Midwest rainstorms / thunderstorms can be conducive to shear terror if you didn’t plan accordingly
We took the kids camping on a cliff overlooking Lake Erie. It was beautiful, but a bad storm rolled in on our last night. The wind was so bad my husband and I had to hold up the wind-facing tent wall to keep it from collapsing while my youngest laid in my cot screaming and crying worried we would be flung off the cliff into the lake. Ahhhhh memories.
Midwest storms is nature's way of teaching you to properly tie down your tent.
Nah.. No tent can stand up to midwest storms which is what the backseat of your vehicle is for. No guarantee of a good sleep but rain proof. Lol
So True, considering that Northern Illinois is the Derecho capital of America, based on a recently released map.
When I was kid, my parents and I drove up into the mountains until our truck literally couldn't drive any further. With help from passersby, we got the vehicle up off the giant boulder it was stuck on, saw how late it was, and decided it would be best to find a camping spot. We trekked into the woods for a half a mile or so, found a spot flat enough, and set up camp. We made sure to keep food up off the ground, swinging high enough from a tree to fend off bears. We were wrong. Since my parents had the gun in their tent, I demanded to have the dog in my tent. Late that night, a bear came trudging into our campsite. It started sniffing at my tent, which is what woke up my dog and I. I could see its snout pushing into my thin tent fabric. My dog's barking finally scared it off. My parents slept through the while thing. When we woke up, our bread, hang up in bags in the tree, was crushed but the bear couldn't really get to it. There were prints all around my tent. The whole thing was pretty scary. After breakfast, we packed up and found a spot at lower elevation, and far from that bears territory, for the 2nd night. I've had quite a few encounters with wildlife in the mountains, but that was definitely one of the most intense.
In some places here in Southern California, you don't even have to go camping for the whole Bear Experience. The bears are quite happy to come to your back yard. Especially if you have a pool. And meatballs.
I moved from So Cal to Alaska some years ago. I have bears out my kitchen window on a regular basis. They usually show up on garbage day. It gets really bad if the salmon return is light. What part of So Cal are you referring too? I presume someplace near a foothill area.
And meatballs? I think there is a story there...a very personal story...
@@kathyp1563 I think she is referring to pets.
West Virginia here. We had a bear living on our farm with her young triplets. Our dogs were so used to them they didn't even bark when they came to play in our yard and around our pool.
Patrick Conley is a channel based in Asheville NC. He posts videos of a female or two visiting his porch, one with 2 babies in tow
“The males just die” is the most emotion I have ever heard Lawrence have in his voice
Was camping at Fort DeSoto State Park in Fl. once. We left the windows open on the car during the day. Went for a bike ride around the park. When we got back to the campsite there was a racoon sitting in the drivers seat of the car. I think if we didn't come back it would've stolen the vehicle. 😂🤣😂🦝🦝🚗🚗
🤣
They are wiley little bastards, he probably had a whole crew hiding out of site ready to Jack your car. Especially Florida raccoons.
🤣🤣🤣 reminds me of the reaction OzzyMan did to the koala in the car. Hilarious
@@midlight9758 😂🤣😂🤣
They wear that mask for a reason.
True camping story in the US: my daughter and one of her friends went camping in a local state park about 20 years ago. They had their closed cooler on the picnic table provided, but had failed to put their grocery bag of non perishable snacks in it. They woke up to chattering and the rustle of their bag. They looked out of the tent and two raccoons were checking out their snacks. They yelled at them, and the raccoons took off--with a giant bag of cheese curls. Later they woke up to tiny little hands poking under the tent, pulling on the bottoms of their sleeping bags, this time when they yelled the raccoons chittered back and eventually retreated.
Better racoons than bears... In most camping environments you tend to separate yourself from your food stores while not actively eating. It'll prevent bears from searching you for dessert.
When listing the ambient sounds of British camping, Laurence fails to mention the sheep, which if you are sleeping outdoors nearly anywhere in the UK in mid-summer, will ensure that you are up at 3am with the sun. Our children's books featuring the 'baaaas' of those charming wooly critters somehow failed to get across just how LOUD the little monsters can be.
The sun comes up at 3AM in the UK? I never knew that.
@@elliebellie7816 Well...I may have been exaggerating somewhat, but the UK is really very far north. If you're camping in Scotland in midsummer, it never really gets fully dark at night at all. The sheep in late June usually start up more like 4ish am (sunrise is around half past four) in my experience, but it can certainly *feel* like 3!
3 am? Wow. So, you roosters start crowing at 3 am? Cows need to be milked at 3 am? How does this differ in the winter/summer?
What time does the sun go down? winter/summer?
@@elliebellie7816 Not even if you go to Scotland and ignore -daylight savings- summer time. But it never gets truly dark in Summer.
@@kathyp1563 Sorry, Kathy, I was exaggerating for comedic effect, but alas, I'm not very good at it. Sunrise in northern England in midsummer was, IIRC, around half past four, with the sheep starting up a little before that. But I'm not much of a morning person, so I have distinct memories of staring blearily out of my tent in disbelief at the racket, glancing at the time, and just feeling like it was waaaaay too early for all those dawn noises.
Sounds like you might have forgotten a few things to make in the camp fire here in West Virginia. Fried potatoes in the cast iron skillet, roasting ears in the husks ( that’s corn on the cob roasted in the husks under hot coals. Soak those in water first) and Mountain pies Never forget the mountain pies. So many varieties of mountain pies. Yum 😋
Try making the s'mores with a reese's cup instead of a Hershey bar. My family likes this variation. They still eat both types. It is just a richer flavor with peanut butter.
I like keebler fudge stripe cookies to replace both the graham and the chocolate. Better flavor and the chocolate melts better in the cold. Plus one less thing to pack. I'll have to try the Reese's, though. 😉
This is such a great idea! Thanks for sharing
Oh, they are so good that way!! :D
@@emilywilliams2970 I'll definitely have to try with the fudge stripes.
Ooh yummy!!😋
I've heard about 's'mores' with digestives and Cadbury bars before, and while they sound tasty, I have one recommendation. No, it's not about the chocolate. The reason we use Hershey's milk chocolate is because a) you can break off squares in the right size and b) unlike any other Hershey's bar out there, they're terrible chocolate and fit only for cooking. I swear, they use a different chocolate for those than anything else they make. On the flip side, earlier this month I was introduced to McVitie's Hobnobs (regular, not chocolate) and my Dad and I immediately went "These taste like graham crackers." So if I were to try having an American camp out in the UK, I would pass on the digestives and grab some Hobnobs. Also, "She'll Be Comin' Round The Mountain" is a campfire classic here in the states, along with "Clementine", "You are My Sunshine" and a bunch of other traditional songs that no one knows in their entirety and are therefore way more morbid than anyone realizes.
When I was young, I sneered at people in RV's, buncha softies that can't handle sleeping rough. I hiked way back into the wilderness, real wilderness like Paysayten with a backpack, tent and a foam pad. Now...I want to buy an RV. My 60+ year old spine just doesn't want to hear about no air mattress bullflop any more.😒
I used to backcountry backpack -- until an ugly fall cross-country skiing. Now the cold goes deep into the bones. I love my RV with a real mattress and a heater!
I sleep on a cot with a 3” thermarest. It is a good compromise for comfort (so far) and there are regularly sleep-ins to 10 am. I could never do those air bed mattresses - my back would die.
Boy that sounds familiar. The ground is a lot harder than it used to be. And then I no longer find bailing out the tent in the middle of the night much fun either.
So I got a little 16 ft camper. A mattress, rain tight and off the ground so it stays dry. As a bonus it has a refrigerator which makes meal planning for our typical four day run much easier, and even a shower to wash off the bug spray, squashed bugs that fought through the spray, and general dust from the hiking.
Glamping indeed compared to my back packing days in actual wilderness areas.
Haha. When I met my husband, he had a travel trailer and asked if I liked camping. I came from a family where we backpacked in the Grand Canyon and camped in tents and foam pad so yes I really liked camping. But nowadays, I can only imagine sleeping inside a tent for maybe 2 days max... I prefer having my bed and personal toilet and shower! You can still 'camp' and eat at your picnic table and sit by a fire... just sleeping comfortably.
I agree!
I finally encountered a wild mountain lion in Pennsylvania about 4 years ago. I wasnt camping ,but driving, and it ran across the highway right in front of me! They are quite rare and it took 30 years to see one in the wild. Im glad my Mom was with me and seen it too or no one would believe it lol. It was so cool! 🐱🦁🦁🐱
"This isn't the actual wild." That can be very dangerous mistake.
Plenty of venomous snakes in the midwest!
Yep, I live next to the woods, plenty of people around, got a neighbor that owns 6 female huskies..coyotes are STILL a thing, since I don't own any animals they come to my yard to hunt the rabbits that like to nibble on the grass in my yard, there's also the odd deer rib cage left lying around once the sun come sup if they got one of the older ones that lives in the woods near by..they'll cart it off after sundown if there's enough meat on it left for them to bother. It don't matter HOW many people are around for bears or coyotes..they'll show up and be dangerous either way if they got a mind to.
@@ShinKyuubi I’ve got deer bear and coyotes and every furry thing known…..none will bother you if you are in the yard and not bothering them….but they are sniffing around for morsels to eat….we try to keep that to a minimum so they usually just wander in then go.
@@jonnycando It's less "danger to people" unless they got something wrong with them like rabies, more of a danger to pets, particularly small ones, my aunt's cat was attacked by a coyote about 2 years ago and her husband had to take a shot at it to scare it off. Domestic dogs are actually more dangerous around here..we got a place a couple miles from where we live that trains guard dogs and one got loose and went after one of my cousins kids after running through the woods for a bit to actually get to her home with a shock collar going crazy on it's neck, since that's how they keep them in the property. If it wasn't for her own dog defending the kid long enough for her to get into the nearby tree house and out of the way things could have gone bad..police came in full bite gear to get it since they had been alerted to it getting loose.
I was just going to comment this, always be worth of wild animals like bears even when just out side bear country
Love to camp. I remember stepping out of my tent in the middle of the night, right into a giant bear track that wasn’t there when I went to bed. This was in the Rockies.🤗🐝❤️
😲
Black or grizzly???
Not as shocking, but I woke up one night in Shenandoah, shined my light to look for a good spot to piss, and found myself LITERALLY SURROUNDED by shining eyes. Too far spaced for raccoon, figured they were deer. Never seen so many in the daytime. Freaked me out for a moment, but I really had to piss.
@@RossPotts Wow! That would have caused me to have an accident right there, and I would have no longer needed to go any further to relieve myself.🐝❤️🤗
@@ANNEWHETSTONE I don’t know, I only saw the track, but it was as big around as my foot is long.😳
Did he mention the 10,000 mosquitos who suddenly become your best friends when you go "glamping"?
LOL!!!
One good thing about heavy rain: it keeps the mosquitoes at bay.
Who needs to go "glamping" in order to find mosquitos? I've got them in abundance here at home. We sometimes joke that they are the Michigan state bird.
That's what bug spray is for.
Mosquitos are never your friends.
My first experience with camping was my taking my brother (11) and I(6) on a tour through the American Southwest. Our camping often consisted of a nice spot on the side of a quiet country road, stringing a rope between two trees, and hanging a tarp over it. This, coupled with another tarp covering the ground underneath it, was our shelter for the night. Roadrunners and Kangaroo rats were common sights, but nothing larger. That was in the late 1960s. I wouldn't dream of trying it nowadays.
We live down in a southern US swamp in the middle of nowhere .When we want to go camping we head to the mountains for a change of scenery .It is far too quiet there so we can't sleep there too well .It is always quiet noisy in the swamps .It is when it gets quiet you have to worry .It usually means a predator is nearby same with the mountains .Quiet at night is not a good thing out in nature .
Yes, I'm in Florida and I don't camp here unless I'm forced into it by a hurricane. Too many insects and snakes. And way to much heat and humidity.
Yep. The sound of crickets and cicadas are like white noise and lull me to sleep.
@@sugarwooki many more people from Florida come here to New York State during the summer where they can camp in the Adirondack mountains, Catskills, etc.
@@rebeccaquartieri5509 I completely understand why!!
Agreed quiet is not good whether it be while camping or at home with youngsters.
Talking about heavier precipitation in the US's South makes me remember a camping trip as a teenager (actually a paintball scenario game, but that's a whole other thing on its own) which included a thunderstorm rolling in late in the afternoon. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to see the door of my tent bowing inward so hard under the force of the wind that it was wavering back and forth just above my face. It was still whole & keeping the rain out, though, so lacking any other reasonable option I just shrugged and went back to sleep.
If you are hiking and camping in bear country you want to take some precautions. It's best to put some little bells on your pack. Bears don't really want to mess with humans and the bells will notify them of your presence and they will stay away (and keep their cubs away). It's also a good idea to carry some pepper spray just in case, and you want the good kind like security guards carry, not the cheap stuff.
You can tell there are bears around from their scat (droppings), they are easily identified because they are quite large, smell like pepper, and have little bells in them.
Standard old joke here in Alaska...Do you know how to tell the difference between Black Bear scat and Grizzly Bear scat? The Grizzly Bear scat has little bells in it.
😂😂😂
@pisswobble Probably about as well as it works for bears... but the scat would be smaller.
@@billkant849 😂😂😂😂
Thank you! I was wondering where I could find that old joke and paste it in here somewhere.
I think it was in the Readers Digest a few decades ago, back when it was a good magazine to read, and much bigger than it is now.
And the joke involved a Forest Ranger or somebody like that telling a group of tourists the difference between a black bear (mild tempered generally, and smaller, and scat full of fruits and berries), and a grizzly bear (hotter tempered and larger, and scat full of tourists, pepper spray and little bells), lol. 😂
Whenever someone from outside the US describes a s'more, I can't help but have flashbacks to the movie Sandlot. The total shock when Smalls doesn't know what a s'more is. "You're killin' me, Smalls. Killin' me."
Just got home from camping in the Yorkshire dales. The wildest animals were the occasional sheep, a particularly persistant cockrel from a nearby farm, and a teenage cow with very floofy ears that all the kids spotted during a walk to a waterfall with accompanying picnic. Quite happily watched shooting stars whilst quaffing gin. Think I'll stick to camping over here. Not sure I could take on a bear...
P. S. We sometimes sing around the firepit after the gin quaffing has progressed, but les mis and cyndi lauper were our most recent attempts at entertainment.
Sounds like a great time!
Come on over. theres no need to worry about yogi and boo boo
It's impossible to fight a bear without a gun. The best you can do is either scare them off by being loud, or run away (and if a bear chases you, it's much faster than a human). In bear country in the US, it's wise to carry bear spray. They hate the smell and will go away unless they have rabies or you do something stupid like stab them with a knife.
Fortunately, black bears rarely have any interest in hurting humans. Grizzly bears on the other hand...
From what I've read, most bear attacks happen for one of two reasons:
1) You get close to a bear cub. It doesn't matter if you have hostile intentions or not. The mama will assume you do.
2) You startle a bear while hiking. For this reason they often recommend that you make noise so you don't surprise any bears. Whack branches with a stick, talk, whistle, whatever.
For what it's worth, bears are absent in most areas of the US. Coyotes roam the streets here in Dallas, and I found a possum in my kitchen a couple of nights ago, but bears are nothing to worry about in Texas.
@@chitlitlah I live in W PA in the woods and farm area. Supposed to be around 17 black bears in a couple mile radius here. Wife and I saw about 4 or 5 hundred pound one a few weeks ago. First one we've seen in over a year. If you're not out beating the bush hunting, you'll almost never see them. Funny we have more black bears than Alaska and out east they have multiples over 800 pounds. Never hear about em in the news.
Living in Florida, I long ago gave up tent camping as there's only a month or two that it's feasible in Florida. Instead we bought an RV (started out with a small one for the first 7 years and now have a big monster 5th wheel RV) and haven't looked back. We use it constantly and I have zero guilt about wanting air conditioning and a nice bed at night. :)
Is that camping, or living in a mobile home?
Air conditioning and a nice bed is the whole reason I don’t camp anymore. Once I can afford an RV was are going that way for sure. I miss all the good things like camp fires and stars.
West Virginian here, I've seen the estimates on our black bear population being as high as 12,000. The only time that they are a threat to humanity is when you happen upon a mother with cubs.
Hi I'm m from Louisiana but 8k bears atill sounded like a very low estimation lol, I think they were trying not to scare people (or maybe they just did a bad job)
@@jhsrt985 Could be, honestly I think that there are probably more than 12,000. I believe that I got that number from official WV state estimates.
I'm not from WV but I lived there for 24 years, when I lived on the mountain it wasn't uncommon to see a black bear rummaging around while you were sitting on the deck, but you're right, they usually just did their own thing and never paid much attention to humans. In fact many people had outdoor dogs that never had any issues with the bears, either. I luckily never saw a mother with cubs. I had more encounters with opossum, deer, skunks, and random livestock that decided to go on an adventure.
My family had a cabin in the Pocono Mountains in northeastern Pennsylvania years ago. Very few full-time residents lived in the area, it was mainly vacation homes of people from New York, New Jersey, and the Philly area. The cabin was right on a river and a lot of animals would go there to drink. One day my mother was driving to the cabin when a neighbor flagged her down. She was all happy and excited, telling my mother to come quickly with her to see the nearby bear cubs. My mom was raised as a city girl but she wasn't totally clueless. She asked the lady if she was nuts because if the cubs were there, mama wasn't far away. She told her to stay away from the cubs and stay in her house until they left. Some people are just dense.
@@Rye_Toast I've actually scared off an adult male black bear with my mere presence. I'm a 5"6' man and I was unarmed at the time. They are definitely spooked by humans.
Years ago when camping in upstate NY, we heard loud singing from a neighboring campsite. We walked through the woods to the nearby fire circle and discovered our melodic fellow campers were a group from Bolton, England. Soon, they invited us to join them and asked us to teach them American camp songs. Sadly, we couldn’t think of any. We were all quite disappointed.
We do lots of winter camping here in the midwest. Best memories with the grandsons!
No bugs too!
I do that in the southeast, that's the only time it's not deadly hot! And less bugs, but still plenty year round here lol
We cold camp more than anything
I watch for the first 28 deg. F night at the airport near where I like to camp in northern Wisconsin. Then I go camping. no bugs, and few whinebagos .( motorhomes,trailers, people. )
@@JohnShinn1960 Exactly!!! One reason to camp in winter...
On a Boy Scout camping trip with my son in Texas it began to rain so hard that the water actually sprayed through the fabric of our tent - this around midnight - and the water was 2 inches deep around the tent which was pitched on the top of a hill. Had to break camp in the flood and the fire ants hitched a ride in our shoes. Rolled into our driveway at home about 2:00 AM. Fun trip, before it started to rain.
Lawrence, you're not a Real American Camper until you've been attacked, or at the very least *stalked,* by a machete-wielding escapee from a Hospital For The Criminally Insane. Your wife should have told you tthis by now! Um, does she like collecting hockey masks, by any chance? Eh? Oh, no reason!
And make sure that you leave the car headlights on all night to run the battery down, park it where it sinks into mud up to the hubcaps, and has no gas in it. You'll miss all the fun if you pack up and instead stay in a remote little roadside motel run by a creepy young man and his mother.
@@joannesmith2484 Also, he needs to remember to ignore the creepy old man or woman who warns him to stay out of the woods, to not go near the lake, or that strange things happen at the old cabin.
🤣🤣🤣
Weird Al's "Nature Trail to Hell" is running in my head, now! 😆
And l, when someone invariably suggests that you split up to look for help, that's a GREAT idea! Do that immediately.
Our family camped once, we never did it again! Camping with 4 Kids was crazy, the work it takes to prepare for camping was no fun. My idea of camping is a nice hotel room, with a bathroom, also cookies and coffee in the lobby and a nice breakfast in the morning!
In addition, an operable TV remote and a mini-bar.
Take a black light to that hotel bed (and the entirety of the rest of the room) and you'll wish you were camping. Or had a vat of antibiotics. We "camp" in an RV. I know my bedding is clean because I'm the one that washed it!
I've slept with the bears and porcupines, not worth a repeat..NOPE! I will say the bear waddled off after a good yell..but not so the porcupine!
Packing for camping is 70% less intense if you delete the cooking. Which is easy to do if camp in a park with services.
Hahaha. I met a group of young British military kids in the front country of the Sierra Nevada. I do love singing around the campfire. But, by 12 midnight I had to walk over to ask them to be quiet. BTW, there was considerable alcohol consumption involved. What cracked me up, after I forgot about the irritation of not being able to sleep, was what they said to me , “We are sorry Marm.” It still cracks me up, years later. BTW, they kept the drunken singing up for hours more.
theskyehiker, so they were sorry, but not really. Somebody didn't spank them enough when they were kids.
Shoulda sent a couple of rounds over, high and tight...
I ran across a group of British Soldiers in the High Sierra backcountry years ago headed for Mt. Whitney who were very polite.. I have had many encounters with bears, coyotes and a single one with a mountain lion which I will always treasure in the National Parks of California.
My girlfriend and I went on a camping trip with some friends to New Braunfels, Texas. After getting a late start, we arrived at the campground after dark. The campground was packed with campers. After searching through the campground for a while, we were pleased at our luck of finding what seemed to be a choice spot that was available. We set up our tents and went to bed. Later that night we discovered why that spot was available. We had pitched our tents on a huge fire ant mound!
We did exactly the same thing on our first night of TX camping (near Austin).
Similar story, but it was Inks Lake, and a skunk nest instead of an ant hill.
I hope you two had a blast.
To funny!
I bought two copies of your brothers book “Everything You know About London Is Wrong”
One for me and one for my aunt. Love it! Please tell him for me if you would. I enjoy your videos and your lovely wife Tara’s. She’s so cute!
I will be speaking to Matt later today and I will gladly pass your kind message on.(Matt and Laurence’s mum)
@@susanbrown5080
You have wonderful sons! I enjoy them both very much. I’m sure you are very proud of them. Thank you for responding!
My friends discovered camping. I discovered that I had a phobia of being stuck with their inebriation in the woods without electricity.
When my boys were in scouts in the midwest they had compass badge that signifies you camped out in all four seasons. I would go out in spring and fall. I told my oldest I was not camping out at 20 below zero or 110 still at midnight.
And they would different get beads for their coos that signified snowfall, below freezing, etc.
In the Boy Scouts I've camped in Michigan when the temperature was -30 with -50 wind chill. The Everglades surrounded by alligators and 99 percent humidity. In NewMexico with daytime highs of 115 degrees and freezing at night (hailed every day I was there, and Cimarron got hit by a tornado, damaging almost every building that people cared about in that town, late July of '96)
Winter camping was one of my favorite BSA campouts - NO MOSQUITOES! it's great to wake up snug and warm in your bag with the deep silence of falling snow! The trick is a good sleeping bag, insulating pad under it, and ALWAYS changing into clean and DRY clothes before getting into you sleeping bag!
I’m old enough now that an inflatable mattress is a necessity and not a luxury 😂
Along with that inflatable doll.
Matresses are for warms, not comfort
I just sleep on the ground like a real Man.
@@ChineseChicken1 hahaha oh yea, sure you are... with a last name like CHICKEN lol...
@@ChineseChicken1 A real man doesn't need to tell people he is a real man...
There's a reason foxes are not mentioned - they're pretty harmless to humans. Foxes normally hunt small animals like mice, squirrels and rabbits.
they're also far more skittish and don't approach our food as often.
Raccoons, on the other hand, are brazen little fuckers...
@SlowHandMcQueeg fr, I've only ever seen evidence of foxes (their widdle pawwss) but raccoons ? lol. everywhere.
also skunks. less directly dangerous but they're only in the Americas and people just don't know
@@fairydustcryptid - that’s exactly why I like raccoons, they’re uppity. 🦝
I love the sounds at night. I actually love sleeping in a tent when it’s raining. Again, something about the sound.
Only if you have a modern waterproof tent, our scouts tents were over 30 years old
@@stephenpitt6363 True. True. But we used to waterproof ours back then. I just don’t remember what we used.Stuff smelled awful.
@@clrobinson1776 bear fat? 🤣🤣
@@LindaC616 🧸
@@clrobinson1776 Use Scotch Guard, these days. Works great.
As a kid we'd go camping & fishing starting in March til November. My grandmother worked at a canvas tent factory and made us a 20 man tent ( we were a family of 10) and slept on cots so much fun.
A lot of what you heard at night might have been the late summer tree frogs. They’re particularly loud until it starts to get cool overnight.
Oohh! I love the Summer Peepers! they're so cute, too.
Cicadas in IL will often be heard as late as 10PM, along with said crickets & peepers. LOVE those sounds.
Just came back from our 2 week - fall - camping trip in the Big Horn Mountains, Wyoming USA. Wish you were with! This time we were very isolated and actually the only animals we heard were coyotes. Freaky in the middle of the night but I wouldn’t want to give up my fall camping.
My dad loved camping before he became a long haul trucker..his idea of camping? Hike about an hour or so into the woods, find a stream, creak, or some other form of flowing water and set up nearby. Oh..yeah..carry ALL your gear with you, including cooking supplies and any dried or canned foods, as well as protective gear like guns and knives..it's a heavy trip, there's no inflatable beds, you're lucky if you get a cot to get off the ground..he's a very traditional camper if given the chance. Oh..about the protective gear? Yeah when you go as deep in the woods as he likes to go? You need stuff to fend off wild animals like bears or coyotes.
Some of my oldest memories are of taking the big canvas tent out of storage for my mom (big thing with aluminum poles) and spending a week down at the fair grounds with others in the organization my grandpa was a part of. Also when my mom was troop leader for some girl scouts. Sitting around the camp fire until late at night, the crackling of the wood, and the unintelligible conversations in the background as I fell asleep. Miss some of those days,
LOL--when I first saw the title, I thought it said "5 Ways British and American CAMPAIGNING is Very Different"!
My family has rerserved a cabin at Rickets Glen State Park in Pennsylvania June, 2022. Reservations are so hard to come by, you have to make them a year in advance! But I consider it "glamping" because the cabin has electricity, toilets, shower, microwave and refrigerator and a fire pit outside.
My kind of camping!
That was one of our favorite campgrounds when we lived in PA, back in the 1960s and 1970s. We tent camped. I loved the trails. Didn't care for the huge pit outhouse - woo wee, did it ever stink! We laugh about it, now.
@@calichigal I'm looking forward to next summer when we can hike the waterfall trail; if it were closer to where I live, I'd go without overnight accomodation.
My favorite form of camping is just renting a Yurt. At least here in the PNW, you can rent them all along the coast of Washington and Oregon. It's a much less annoying form of camping and far more restful. Also, it is a unique experience to be lulled asleep by the Pacific Ocean, the lonely sound of a jetty horn and Sea Lions barking in the distance. I highly recommend it!
Keep a metal 8-9" layer cake pan and a wooden or sturdy plastic mixing spoon in your camping equipment. Before you snuggle into your sleeping bag on your comfortable inflatable mattress, make sure pan and spoon are next to you in easy reach. If you hear any animal noises, such as a bear snuffling around your tent, grab the pan and start banging it with the spoon. In over 60 years of camping, I've only used my bear pan once, but I also always sleep better knowing it's there!
I camped with family friends years ago who did this when a young bear approached the campsite in daytime. The bear went around us, but stayed headed in the direction it wanted to go.
Beach camping. If you've never done it, you gotta! The sound of the waves crashing on the shore to lull you to sleep, is just heavenly!
When I was a child we went camping on the slopes of Mt. Adams in Washington State. It is a dormant volcano near Mt. St. Helens, a peak that lost it's head a few years back.
Anyway, we actually WERE visited by bears in the middle of the night.
However, a thoughtful (?) camper had left food scraps in the trash cans some 100 feet away, so the bears went for those, not us.
Next morning we found trash and the highly dented garbage cans strewn around.
I have been camping near Mt. Adams quite a bit in the last few years. You get to hear the sounds of avalanches happening up on the Mountain during the night. I bet they don't have that in the UK.
My favorite area to go camping/hiking was always around Icicle Creak near Leavenworth. The wildlife I would see most often were marmots.
As an American, my father used to take the family camping a lot as a child. Now I am an adult; and nobody can make me do that crap anymore
😅😅😅😅
Oh no my dad was NOT a camper. Two of brothers (whom were eagle scouts) were.
If your dad was like the dad in Calvin and Hobbes, I can quite understand it.
Hahahahaha 😂
Roughing it (camping) to me is a nice hotel room where your bed is made up each day
I grew up camping with family and Girl Scouts, and learned to play guitar because of the campfire sing-alongs. So many happy memories! But the one that is still so clear in my mind more than 45 yrs later, was the week of July 4, 1976. I was 16 yrs old & deeply annoyed that I would miss all the Bi-centennial celebration parties/ parades/ fireworks & events because my parents chose to take yet another wilderness/ canoe camping trip into the Sylvania National forest, a wilderness preserve of untouched forest and wildlife, with campsites only accessible by paddling and portaging your canoe & gear to your remote campsite. We rarely saw another living soul while there, unless it was another canoe passing through or fishing across the lake. But on that 4th of July, as we sat around our campfire listening to the evening loon calls fade, we heard 'The Star Spangled Banner' echo across the water from an unseen campsite somewhere across the lake - we sung back 'America the Beautiful' and our neighbors replied in kind. We continued to serenade each other for an hour or more, ending with Taps. Turned out to be the most meaningful 4th of July I've ever known.
I always remember the time that we went camping (edit: in Massachusetts) and my dad left the little tilt-out windows on his car open, and we woke to find that some chipmunks had snuck in and were enjoying the snack food that had been left in the back seat.
As an American , I can say I've done quite a bit of camping in both the U.S. , England and Europe during the 1960s. The biggest difference then was not being allowed to have a campfire in campgrounds abroad. While campgrounds in America have picnic tables, you had to bring your folding camp table and chairs in UK and the rest of Europe. Most campgrounds abroad have nice modern clean restroom facilities. I was impressed with the huge sizes of tents abroad, that were the size of cabins , and had big plastic windows.
Worst animal we encountered while camping was a screech owl in the tree next to our tent. That will keep you up!
Just got back from camping in a Canadian campground that allowed you to select the level of comfort you desired. This time we stayed in a "trapper's tent", which was on a raised wooden platform, had cots with mattresses, a bison skin hide to keep you warm, and a box with all your kitchenware, bannock and tea. Being able to stand up fully and stretch your arms up is the height of comfort!
Years ago, when I was in the US Marines, my unit went to the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Northern California for Mountain Warfare School. We did the course first, then we were broken up into two-man teams to assist with an escape and evasion exercise. My partner was a heavy-duty country boy, I was a city boy (although I camped a lot when I was a kid). First night, I heard loud grunting sounds. My partner said that was bears grunting. I was a little nervous, but got over it. About day four, we woke to sheep bleating. We knew there were flocks of sheep in the mountains looked after by Basque sheepherders. I stuck my head out of our pup tent and ended up nose to nose with a big ugly ram. I slowly backed up into the tent, which my partner said was a good idea on my part. We waited a few minutes until we heard the ram move off and we came out and met the sheepherders. They were very friendly and shared their Bota bags with us. Good wine. I really enjoyed my time out there. Stream trout fishing, frog gigging with homemade gigs, and our resupply people brought out cans of soda and the mountain streams kept the soda quite cold. We had C-rations, but trout and frog legs were also on the menu.
I grew up camping. The sound of cicadas or rain on a tent is music to my ears.
In my early 20s, I had a job as a camp counselor. Part of the job entailed taking groups of teenage boys on camping trips on the Lake Michigan beach. No tents. Beach sand is great to sleep on. You can shape it to your body. It just gets into everything if you're not careful.
Sounds like a dream trip!
I laid on the warm sand after sunset in Hawaii and it felt wonderful.
My earliest camping experiences were being driven by my dad into continental Europe to campsites he'd seen in a brochure where the company pitch your tent for you and you just bring a sleeping bag to sleep on a camp bed! A small kitchen is provided also
The above experience was so different the first time I went to a music festival, which is why now I just rent a van and put the mattress from my spare room in the back, which is great as you don't get woken up by the sun rising and heating your tent so its as hot as a bloody oven!
Camp often…and no glamping, as it’s hard to fit luxury items on a motorcycle…
The singing-camping experience definitely does exist in the US. It is most likely to happen as part of a group camping experience like boy scouts, girl scouts, at a youth camp, or church camping.....
If alcohol is involved or can spontaneously happen anywhere.
Also if any family member plays guitar. But then, most of those families regularly have jam sessions at home, as well.
I went camping a hour out of Denver in the Rockies and close by we had moose, raccoons, chipmunks, foxes, coyotes, squirrels, mosquitoes, a bear and my friends huskies dogs.
Did you ever encounter beavers? Or wolves?
Yes, them too not this time though
No wolves here but mountain lions are around
@@edwelty I'm in Calgary. No need to go to the mountains to see wild animals. Here, they come to us. There was even a sighting of a moose at our airport earlier this year.
PS up here, people usually book camping trips in camps, with amenities. That is what I think of when I hear the word glamping. Sleeping in tents with the RV parked nearby.
@@mayloo2137 as long as there's a place with running water, I will camp. If you want me to live without facilities, you'd better give me something exciting to do, like canoeing, rafting, or riding. It's the only way I'll go. 🙂
I laughed at "bratwOrst". Aren't they tasty, though?
Great shot of the fox doing a nosedive!
Lmao when Laurence first said "S-mores", I was almost asleep whilst camping...and I thought he said "Smalls"...as in, "You're killing me, Smalls!" !!!🤣 Yes I am that old hahaja!
I heard "smalls" too! 😁
S'more of what?
Don't know how accurate but I always learned for bears:
If it's brown, lay down.
If it's black, fight back
If it's white, goodnight
That's the one! I couldn't remember the black bear part.
You forgot to mention skunks. One of the memorable camping trips of my childhood was in the California mountains (Mt. Palomar). A skunk walked right though our campsite in the evening while I was coming back from the restrooms. It's difficult to say who was more shocked, me or the skunk. What a stench!
I have substantial past experience with bears that are too curious or aggressive.
Get a large black umbrella.
Paint big white eyes on it.
Flash it open if you're approached.
Yelling helps. Even scares cougars.
By the way, if you ever hear someone in America call s’mores “schmoes”, that’s because it’s a Toy Story reference. We say it all the time at my house 😂
I don't remember S'mores in Toy Story.
@Bossfan49 it was in the beginning of Toy Story 2. Andy was heading off to camp and was taking Woody with him. Woody couldn't find his hat and panicking over it. Buzz told him not to worry because in a couple of hours he'd be sitting around a campfire with Andy making delicious hot schmoes to which Woody had to correct him and tell him they were called s'mores.
@@celestialmoongirl yes!
@@celestialmoongirl “they’re called s’mores buzz”
“Schmoes”
“S’mores”
“Schmoes”
*Repeats for another 10 hours*
In my younger days I would go rustic camping. No electric, no water, no plumbing. You had to bring everything. I had a one ton Chevy truck with an 8 foot bed and loaded it with what I needed for 2 weeks. Sometimes I would hitch my 10 foot utility trailer and load on my quad ATV, 110gallons of fresh water, 55 gallons of extra gas, a generator, strings of lights, a small electric fridge, and we would get lost in the upper peninsula of Michigan. Usually around Copper Harbor and camp at the old Keweenaw Rocket Range. Lots of wild life. Lots of things to experience. 2 weeks were not enough time.
1 billion years ago, when I was in Boy Scouts, I seemed to be very adept at winter wilderness survival camping. That’s not a bad time to have as Nebraska winters can very suddenly be quite brutal. One Eagle badge and thirty years on, that campsite I’m heading toward better have a sign indicating “free continental breakfast” and have comfortable beds.
If you want a good night's sleep, you need to hear the call of the loon across the northeastern US and most of Canada. It's a strange sound, but strangely relaxing.
Love loons. We visit Ontario frequently (or did before 2020) and stayed on the Kawartha Lakes . If we were lucky the loons would serenade us. Just a great memory
My favorite kind of camping is staying at a motel or hotel, and walking down the hallway to use the communal microwave oven.
🤣🤣🤣 You are brave for risking life and health trying using that thing ...hat off to you for being so adventurous
Same. I’m happy to go camping at the Marriott
You're still risking.....the bedbugs...
Camping and the outdoors are a way of life in Alaska, and still very different compared to the lower 48 states. My poor wife from Northern Ireland did not realize what she was getting herself into years ago but has began to embrace the wilderness haha
I love the sound of crickets. Did Laurence say that the UK doesn't have them? Living in NC I've gotten used to loud cicadas and loud frogs of various kinds. The frogs in the pond across the road seem to multiply and become much louder after a good rainstorm.
When he said all you could hear was the wind and creaking trees it sounded like something straight out of a horror film! Give me cicadas, frogs, and a river to sing me to sleep anytime!
@@MM-jf1me Britain has crickets, but not cicadas.
I'm watching this video on camping while sitting in my travel trailer in a campground.
When I went camping we always had to be careful of skunks. Now that we live out in the country, not too far from a creek, we have to be careful of fox, raccoons, minks, coyotes, opossum and skunks. You REALLY don't want to meet up with a skunk! We live in northwest Ohio.
I camp fulltime. I haven't slept in a building in 6 years. I love it. Haven't been sick in years. Its amazing.
Living in the southwest has amazing weather and the stars most people will never able to see.
Two weeks ago, I was out camping at a lake … here in Germany, where there are almost no dangerous animals to worry about. Ok, racoons are by now part of the wildlife here, as well (runaways from people who had them as pets), which made us look out for our rubbish bins. I guess camping in Germany is relatively similar to what you do in Britain. Except that my friends and I actually DO like to sit around a campfire and sing.
My wife and I go camping, not in a tent but in a pop-up trailer camper. We have an outdoor collapsible trash can that we secure to the camper frame and keep zipped closed. On a recent camping trip we were falling asleep and heard a rustling where our trash can sits. We ran off a raccoon that was rummaging. The next morning we saw that the wily bugger had been working to unzip the lid.
Also, thank you for pronouncing s'mores correctly.
"So it's a good idea to secure it (the cooler) with a bungee cord and affix the cooler to a tree and put the tree inside a safety deposit box and blast the whole thing off into space."
Give raccoons time, and they'll discover space travel just to get at all those space coolers. 😂😂😂
We had a site with a latched box for food. Woke up in the middle of the night because the raccoons had separated the bottom portion, reached up and snagged a bag of trail mix, and clawed a hole in it. Again and again (no matter how often we chased them away), they'd reach in and pop a peanut, m&m, or raisin out like it was a damn gumball machine.
I liked camping in tents until I became middle aged. After that I’d need a week to recover from a weekend camping trip.
Are there skunks in the UK?
Because they're probably the most problematic wild animal to encounter while camping after raccoons.
Ha ha. That's so true. The only real camping crisis we've ever had is a big collie getting royally skunked. The urgency to get the dog clean without shaving off all of its beautiful coat brought the camping trip to a screeching halt.
True - trying to make a twilight or dawn bathroom run and having a skunk or two in your way makes you wish for a motel room.
@@ClockCutter I grew up with a collie who had very little sense around skunks, and indeed, that sure is a lot of fur to de-skunk! I remember nights with my mom pouring gallons of tomato juice all over the poor dog, who would stand there shivering miserably in the bathtub. Probably there are more effective remedies now, but when I was a kid, it was always tomato juice.
@@elkins4406 Heh. After hunting down some big cans of tomato juice, which is what brought the trip to an end, we took the dog to a lake and cleaned her up in the lake. The tomato juice worked well enough to put the dog in the back of the truck and head home.
No, we don't have Skunks, or Racoons! We have Foxes and Badgers
An inflatable mattress is great when when you want to sleep on the ground, but not immediately.
At one of the boy scout camps my son attended, they were told not to use square knots to secure their kitchen boxes because the raccoons had learned how to untie them. (Personally, I thought it was just a way of getting them to practice knot tying, because a confounded raccoon would probably just chew through the rope, but, when I challenged it, the leaders assured me that they had seen it happen, so... )
In the UK, I have learned, they use the somewhat charming term "wild camping" to refer to what we generally call just "camping." I think wild camping refers to the act of finding a campsite when you are hiking -- something like what we would call backpacking or back-country camping. When it comes to wild animals, I have gone camping and backpacking for more than four decades and never had any problems with them. I have seen all kinds of animals, including bears and rattlesnakes, but (knock on wood) no confrontations.
He avoided coyotes and wolves. Not that I want to add to his anxiety while camping. He also missed the terms “caravan” and “trailers” which no video on Brit v. Merican camping can be without.
Would coyotes or wolves pose much of a danger to adult humans? I've heard that wolves are more wary and stay back. I don't know if that's really the case or not.
In Australia, dingoes can be a danger. Dingoes are large feral dogs - originally brought over/acquired through trade or contact by the natives from the people of islands to the north (outlying Indonesian islands perhaps) before European contact. Dingoes have been known to attack children and babies - the notorious Azaria Chamberlain case, for example. The Chamberlains had been camping in a tent. Fraser Island has a lot of dingoes and attacks have happened there.
My last camping trip consisted of rain, rain, and more rain. The only bear I saw was Yogi Bear since we were at Jellystone park 🐻 And RVs…lots of RVs. I’ve always felt that was cheating, but after all that rain while tent camping, I wished for the safety of an RV
At Boy Scout camp. I was trying to earn my fishing merit badge. We had to collect bait that a fish would go after. I caught a frog and put it into my little mess kit pot w/lid (I let it go, later, you bleeding hearts). I had it under my camp bed. Nothing like hearing a racoon trying to get into it in the middle of the night!
On 4th of July, our wood was too wet from recent rains, so we couldn’t build a campfire. We still grilled, but the indoor grill wasn’t exactly s’mores-friendly. The kids were prepared to be disappointed, but I grabbed forks, a pillar candle, and after a firm, “Don’t try this on your own,” a tradition was saved.
My camping nights are over, but the border is closed so I can't cross to give my tent to my grandsons. It might be moldy by now. I hope not. I've camped on both sides of the border, and on both sides of the Pond. My favorite was on Lake Zurich in Switzerland. I took one last dip in the lake before getting into the rental car without rinsing my swimsuit. I figured I'd rinse it at the next Camping (to Americans: that's what Europeans call campgrounds). Unfortunately I didn't make it to the next Camping before it shut the gates for the night, so I ended up sleeping in the car on the side of a countryside road. (I wasn't alone, for what it's worth). I awoke early in the morning to the thinking sounds of cowbells and a gently snuffling noise. I opened my eyes and was looking into the nostrils of a curious cow sniffing at my window. It was the most surreal camping I've ever experienced. Meanwhile my swimsuit was lying on a towel across the flat space at the rear window of the car. Since you've swum in Lake Michigan, or at least probably got your swim trunks wet in the lake, you know what happens if you don't rinse it right away. It's the same with my home lake, Lake Huron. And that's what I was expecting to smell nearly a week after Lake Zurich, because i hadn't been able to rinse my swimsuit. But when I was finally able, the scent of the Alpine Lake was so sweet that I didn't dare get it wet again. It was many years before I wore that suit again, regretfully only because I had to go to a water aerobics class and couldn't find a swimsuit in winter. And after all those years of being stored in a plastic bag in my drawer the scent of Lake Zurich was still sweet. I was so sad to have to exchange it for the scent of indoor swimming pool chlorine.
Love seeing bears while camping here in West Virginia. It's always a treat. Had one sniff my ear though the tent one night.
0:21 "While this was largely in-TENT-ded"
I see what you did there
I am a big time glamper! I even have an outdoor kitchen set up! My British hubby doesn’t share my love for it, but goes because I love it so! It rains every time we go and for the most part it doesn’t phase me, but last summer we had torrential rain and flooding that sent us home for 2 nights. We just dropped the canopy, closed up the tents and went to dinner. Everything inside was safe and dry due to bathtub floors on the tents. We, of course, have high end mattresses…Nemo Nomads and hubby and I even have a fancy double NemoJazz sleeping bag. We have even gone car camping together, staying in our Suburban for 3 nights and leaving the 4 minor children with our adult daughter, her husband and the two grandchildren.
Out here in the southwest, we have mostly coyotes (basically tiny wolves), which often serenade with yip-yips a little after sunset or after a kill.
They may try to nab stuff from your campsite when it gets really quiet, but rarely confront people.
Yes, there are red wolves (about 60 pounds), some black bear in the mountains and if you are far enough south, the jaguars.
People bring bear spray (monster pepper spray) for the bears or a gun (hey, it is Arizona), but I haven't heard of any good countermeasures for jaguars since they usually jump from behind.
There are debates about whether 357 magnum or 10mm auto are strong enough for black bear. Most people are skeptical and prefer a good deer rifle or better. Yeah, they usually run off if you jump up and down and shout, but if they don't run off then they are in it to the finish. Don't play dead with black bear, fight fight fight.
I'm in Arizona, so you have to look out for about 6 kinds of venomous snakes, mostly rattlers. The scorpions can be painful but not actually that dangerous. The troubling thing is that the most venomous ones are the smallest and very hard to see.
I haven't really had much trouble with the wildlife while camping here.
The most obvious risk is the weather. It gets way too hot in the day , so you have to really plan your water. It doesn't rain often, but when it does, it is extremely strong and flash floods tend to happen.
Easy, you say, I'll just pick a bit of higher ground and stay out of the arroyos (trailing lower parts of canyons), right?
Wrong. We also get a lot of lightning with or without the rain. So you don't want a high spot to get fried.
So you want a sort of local high spot in a low-ish area, but not near a flash flood trough and not too close to a tree.
That's about 2 spots per acre if you're lucky. I'm not exaggerating the lightning. We were camping at Boy Scouts summer camp and had a storm come through for about 2 hours with lightning along for the ride. After the storm, we went out and found 2 trees that had been hit and split by lightning and had burned some, but the heavy rain had put them out. That was within about 50 yards.
Oh, up in the higher, bigger mountain ranges you can get deer and elk. They aren't much trouble, but the elk make a funny bugling sound. Not moose, but elk, sort of a very large lumpy looking deer with a much thicker hide. Moose are farther north, luckily.
When bear are around, you need to put all your food and trash up on a line between trees about 12 feet up.
The Grand Canyon has ringtails, which are a relative of the raccoon. They look a lot like large house cats with long tails and climb trees like it was walking. They are really good at getting into your stuff, so even the tree hanging method has to be done very well.
The squirrels will get into your backpack and nibble into all the smaller bags to find food.
Late edit : I forgot about the coati mundi! They look like large, chubby raccoons but with a lower contrast coloring, and are from a similar weasel related family.
I haven't seen them too often, but I assume they get into everything just like the raccoons, Little hands for causing trouble.
Second edit : I find the best drink for the campfire is a nice Islay scotch, such as Laphroaig. Good and peaty/smokey.
Just spent last weekend at Assateague State Park in Maryland; a barrier island with wild horses on it. At any time day or night you could have a bunch of horses saunter through your camp investigating everything for scraps of food, making a dangerous nuisance of themselves and destroying things, and leaving....presents to mark their passing. The signs say to stay 40ft away from them. They do not read these signs. It was a heck of an experience.
I remember reading about the island and its horses as a kid, and wanting to go there someday. It sounds like there might be some downsides to the whole idea...