Packing too much stuff

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How much stuff do you need?


This is our fourth season of owning a camper, but only our third season of using it.  We didn't get out at all in 2015 because we were house shopping and moving.  So this year we were hoping to go on a few more trips, which warranted rethinking what we have packed in the camper.

The first year we went out I know I over packed the cabinets with food stuffs.  It's a bad habit I have so this year we made a conscious effort to go through everything we had and make sure it was there for a reason.

Space isn't a serious issue for us.  We're not full timers, and it's only the two of us, so we have plenty of room.

Our Rig

Kitchen Kit.

Pots and pans we managed to do well on.  I do as much cooking as I can on the grill (hoping to cook more over open fires this year) so our pots and pan needs are pretty low.  I have a cast iron skillet that does most of the breakfast cooking, A cake pan, a pie pan, a 2 quart sauce pan with a lid and a four quart stock pot with a lid.  Add to that a strainer and you've got our pots and pans.

The wife is a coffee drinker so we have to have a coffee cup for her.  Along with that we have four tumblers, four plates, four saucers, four bowls, one large bowl used for mixing, plus the flatware to go along with that.

We do occasionally have guests at the campground, so having a four place setting for meals is good.  You can totally do this on paper plates if you wish though.  We also have two additional coffee cups for guests (just in case).

A cookie sheet (small) and a silicone sheet liner are on board also.  This, combines with items from the pots and pans, would allow us to bake a cake, or pie, or cookies.  These items also serve any number of baking duties so I highly recommend you include them in your kitchen kit.

Food and Drink.

I mentioned the wife is a coffee drinker.  We have a small Keurig single serve coffee maker.  She has a full size Keurig at home, and this lets her bring along the coffee flavors she likes and get a consistent cup of coffee in the morning.  We also pack some instant coffee varieties for those times when we might be boondocking and not have electricity.

With the coffee comes sweetener, we bring a variety in case we do have guests that prefer a type of sweetener other than what the wife uses, as well as creamer.  She prefers a brand that needs refrigeration, but I'm considering some of the powder stuff for those really desperate times.

I like to include some dry drink mix packets.  The type that mix in a standard water bottle are good.  You can reuse the bottle with filtered water to cut down on waste during the trip.  Tea bags are also a staple for camping.

One thing we really had to work on was all the dry and canned goods I packed.  I carried stuff that we weren't eating and was just taking up space.  Canned soups, dry pasta, beans.  Things that we might eat, but were never part of the meal plan for camping.  Granted, they would have come in handy had we needed top spend extra time out unexpectedly, but for normal camping they were just taking up space and adding management to the camper that wasn't worth it.

The plan for this season is to plan our meals better for trips.  We've been really good about breakfasts, and dinners haven't been too bad, but our lunch planning has been terrible.  We have hopes of at least two week long trips this summer, so we want to try and do a better job of provisioning for those.


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