Apologies to The Grateful Dead.
Thanks for finding us. We have tips and tricks for having a great time camping in the great outdoors while getting the best possible return on our investment. We aren’t so much mean as frugal. That’s a virtue. We here at Lone Loon Song are dedicated to squeezing the absolute most joy out of our experiences for the absolute least investment of time, effort, and Simoleons. Without too much hubris, we can truthfully say that we have not been without success in our efforts. In the hope of being thought “useful” – another virtue – we intend to share what we have learned, the good and the not-so-wonderful in the hope that it will be of assistance to our friends. (A euphemism for “readers”.)

Our Camping Journey
We first started camping at quite a young age. Unlike most people, we didn’t go with my parents. We went with friends. This was a long time ago before the Earth had fully cooled, and you still had to watch for hotspots and woolly mammoths.
We were “stealth camping” although nobody talked like that at the time. We were 10 or 11 years old, and we went to the dykes of the Bay of Fundy in The Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, Canada. There were no grown-ups, not a living soul to tell us what to do. If you’ve ever seen the incredible Rob Reiner movie “Stand By Me“, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what that was like. (Sans leeches, Gods be praised.)
Well, that was it. We were hooked.
We’ve Recently Become Intrigued With Cheap, Incredible DSLR Cameras
We started recording our adventures with an inexpensive Olympus 1050, a point and shoot digicam – as the cool kids say – around 2013 or so. Starting in 2020, or about the time the pandemic really began to get serious, we got serious ourselves. After screwing around for almost 30 years, we finally knuckled down and properly learned the right hand technique necessary to play slide guitar. Then we got a new iPhone, and decided we liked photography. We wrote about that in our article How To Get The Best Camping Or Outdoor Photographs On A Budget of $0. (Or Double Your Money Back).
For reasons that are still unclear, we became infatuated with digital sensors for cameras. Pretty much organically, we found ourselves researching DSLR cameras with CCD sensors manufactured from about 2005 up until about 2014 or so. We wrote several articles related to this. You can read all of our thoughts by selecting the Posts link in the heading.
You see, you can get incredible cameras for very little money. That is exactly what we at Lone Loon Song love. The most goodness for the least amount of money. In all things, we apply this philosophy. Join us, won’t you?
This image is from a new-to-us 2006 Nikon D40 (with a “nifty-fifty” 50mm lens). We paid about $115.00 CDN all told, including the lens. We’re really enjoying learning how to use this thing. It’s challenging, but so is roughing it in the great outdoors.

So, from guitars to campsites, computers to lenses, that’s what we’re all about. Welcome. Here’s a little about ourselves:
My long Camping story short:
We went camping every chance we could. Unfortunately, that wasn’t all that often.
In High School, we were distracted by basketball, rock and roll, guitars, and girls. (Not necessarily in that order.)

In University, we joined a rock and roll band – we called ourselves “The Bouncing Czechs”. We weren’t great, but we did all right, and we were a lot of fun. The other guys graduated when I finished my second year, so I just jammed or sat in with other local bands.
We were camping in the summertime when our jobs allowed it. We still loved it, but school costs money. We think that is when we started to think about camping on the cheap, to be honest. We refined the art of living on the cheap, to be completely honest. Of course, we have refined our approach over the years, learned from a lot of mistakes, what works, best practices and so on.
When we finished school with an excellent, though worthless education (B.A. General – Philosophy and Political Science), we went home, as one does, got a day job, and started a rock and roll band. We called ourselves “The Raspberry Jam” This too, was a lot of fun.
I guess we were okay. We released an independent record. We were too busy to go camping. We had the day job during the week, and the gigs on the weekends. We liked Dylan and The Rolling Stones – but we played a lot of blues and stuff. Some of that stuff still exists. Apparently, some people liked that stuff. We were the lead guitar player.
That fizzled out, and so we moved from Nova Scotia to Vancouver, British Columbia. Basically, it was a rinse and repeat. We did manage to release another independent record.

When that band failed, we found ourselves doing a lot more digital media stuff. We also had a lot more free time on the weekends – and British Columbia is an unbelievable place to go camping. So we did a lot of that.
What does all of this **** have to do with camping, ya Loon!?
All right, all right. Keep your shirt on. We’ll pull this all together, you just need patience. Which is a virtue. Which leads me to our buddy Scott Prudence. He played in “The Raspberry Jam” lo those many years ago. (He was the guy singing “Clean Cut Kid”. He just released a great record – “Nowadays” by Scott Prudence and The Other Virtues. You should buy it.
So, long story short, nowadays (See what we did there? Hah!) we live in Southern Kyushu, in Japan. We’ve been here for about 21 years. Did you know that they have a different word for almost everything? Well, they do.
Anyhow, all that being said, we go camping all the time. People often ask us about camping stuff. So, we thinks to ourselves, “Selves,” We says, “Why don’t you start a camping blog that will encourage people to get out there and go camping?”.
And we thought to ourselves: “Let’s do just that.”

Links to:
To be continued …