About Lone Loon Song – Camping Like loons – Or, What a long strange trip its been.

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 share what we have learned in the hope that it will be useful 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.

My long Camping story short:

We went camping every chance I 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.

I was camping in the summertime when my job allowed it. I still loved it, but School costs money. I think that is when I started to think about camping on the cheap, to be honest. Of course, I have refined my approach over the years, learned from a lot of mistakes, and so on.

When I finished school with an excellent, though worthless education (B.A. General – Philosophy and Political Science), I went home, as ya would, 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. I 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. I also had a lot more free time on the weekends – and British Columbia is an unbelievable place to go camping. So I 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 I did there? Hah!) I live in Southern Kyushu, in Japan. I’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 …