Winter Camping Tips

This is our first year of winter camping in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. We're trying to venture out every other weekend, watching weather reports and trying to find the rare bits of sunshine so that we can enjoy the great outdoors while not being cramped up inside with our two young children on the weekends.

There have been some noticeable differences to us as we go out in the cold weather.

• It's cold. Our little electric space heater doesn't make a dent when the high is in the low 30s. We use it to supplement our furnace which warms up our 31-foot Coachmen Freelander quite quickly.

• It's colder at night. We really don't like wasting the propane (because at over $2/gallon, it's like burning dollar bills) when we can bring extra blankets. But we noticed the extra blankets truly didn't make a dent on really cold nights. We found a pretty cozy solution by buying an electric mattress heating pad. It goes underneath the fitted sheet and has dual controls for both his and her side of the bed. Very nice since we both like different temperatures. For the kids, we decided to buy an electric blanket found on sale after the holidays. Tried it out last weekend and wish I would have just bought individual blankets instead of a king-size blanket. You'd think it would be big enough to share, but apparently not... But that's an entirely different blog topic! Buying these blankets is hopefully a one-time expense and with what we're saving by not running our furnace at night, they will pay for themselves in one season.

Winterization

We also had our rig winterized. Quite a few people poo-pawed this idea since it rarely freezes here in the PNW. But when temps dropped to record lows in December, we were feeling pretty wise.

I found an easy solution to washing dishes with no running water or grey tank access: I just have two dish pans that fit in each sink. One I fill with suds, the other with rinse water. It actually isn't a hardship at all to have find some vegetation in an out of the way spot to drain these. We use 'green' dish-washing soap and scrape our dishes really well so to leave as little trace as possible (we could also find a grey dump station if the water was gross). I warm the water on the stove (during our last outing a couple of weekends ago, the faucet was frozen solid at our campsite the last morning there - was very happy I'd filled my water container the night before!) and then split it between the two tubs with a little cold water to cool it down.

I also use paper plates a lot more and try to do as much of the meal prep as possible at home to eliminate the mess that comes with it.

The biggest challenge I find is not having access to the bathroom in the middle of the night. While this isn't terrible, it sure is inconvenient! But it provides a little extra exercise for the entire family and will make us appreciate the convenience so much more once warmer weather rolls in and we're able to use our tanks again.

What are your best winter RVing tips?