The Ultimate Camping Experience
Thursday, November 06, 2014
Our family discovered Rainbow Beach hire a camp over Christmas time. We had heard of it before, but due to a last minute cancellation, we grabbed a site for two days and ended up loving it so much that we stayed a week.
Our family discovered Rainbow Beach hire a camp over Christmas time. We had heard of it before, but due to a last minute cancellation, we grabbed a site for two days and ended up loving it so much that we stayed a week.
A bit on our family first…. We love camping and own a huge comfortable tent. We call it the TentMahal. It’s a big spacious monster which takes about 3 hours to put up. We also have all the odds and ends needed to make a camping stay comfortable. When we can get a week off in a row, we love to camp, but these days, time is the key.
It usually takes me a day to pack for a week away. I also need at least a day to unpack and clean everything. Our tent is magnificient, but it takes a good few hours to set up, and then to set up our mess tarp or lounge room, another couple of hours.
During this time of set up I usually have a couple of excited kids hassling me, and they sit by and complain about being bored, nothing to do and when they will be able to go to the beach. Meanwhile my better half and I have a couple of domestic’s that sound like. Where have you put the hammer, I can’t find the pegs. No! Hold that one, not that one!! Apart from the Tent Mahal our tent is also called “fight in a bag”.
Luckily we found Rainbow Beach Hire a camp!! When we arrived we couldn’t believe our eyes.. My husband and I looked at each other with a shocked look on our face as our lovely host Cassie held her breath. We were so thrilled.
Not only were two tents all set up for us, there was also a separate mess tarp with everything that we would have filled a trailer with, and dragged for 200k’s up the highway. I’ll take the time to detail it, because it’s important to know what you get for your money.
The two tents included camp stretchers for both kids, and a double bed stretcher for us.
The mess tent included shade cloth flooring, table for six, chairs for four, barbeque, two burner gas cooker. All snuggly and undercover
Plates, pots, pans, utensils. A huge esky, a toilet / shower tent with shower and toilet.
Washing up table and bucket, a battery lamp and the best of all, a huge fluro light connected to a car battery.
I could tell that Cassie knows camping, and what to do to make for a comfortable stay.
So after stowing our food in the esky and throwing dooners on the beds, we were off down the beach to start our holiday. 20 minutes tops!!
Beautiful Inskip provided such a great holiday. You can walk for miles, fish, swim and boogie board, and make sand castles. Part of the reason we love camping is that we are forced away from technology, and can really relax and do nothing. Our family are keen fishers, and we found a great spot to pump for yabbys, which means free bait. We stayed at Beagle Campsite, there were lots of familys there for our kids to pal up with and run around, and we met some great people too.
The kids ran, swam, climbed trees, fished, made cubby houses, built sandcastles, kicked balls, played cricket, and just had the kind of holiday that you want your kids to have.
They make lots of friends in the campsites around and each evening they roasted marshmellows, hunted ghost crabs, and played in the dunes with torches. Sometimes we lay out and chatted about the stars. (Remind me to swat up on my astronomy before Easter) The kids fell into a dirt coma each night and had a salt bath each morning. (Don’t stress – it’s camping and those sleeping bags can be washed) The kids just didn’t care so we decided we didn’t either.
Each evening we would set up our campfire and toast marshmellows . The stars at night are something to be seen. After the kids went to bed each night (or I should say collapsed into bed) we had a drink and a chat in front of the fire and did some star gazing ourselves.
The position of the camp is to die for, right on the beach tucked in under trees and shelterd by the dunes. So we were both beachfront, but shaded and protected by the dunes from any wind gusts. The benefit of using the hire a camp service, is that they know the terrain so well, and they know exactly what the weather does in that part of the world, so as others were exposed to the weather, we were snug and protected.
For anything we forgot, we ran into Rainbow Beach town and picked it up, you can also have a quick meal in there and if you want a daytime outing or two, we recommend Carlo sand blow, the coloured sands, and the ferry trip over to Tin Can Bay to feed the dolphins by hand. The first two are completely free, the trip to Tin Can Bay was really cheap.
If you have itchy feet you can go into Rainbow beach town every day. Its about 8k’s away from memory, and there are also spots along the way to fill up on water. I had never camped without running water before, and I was shocked by how easy it was. You just need to get in the swing of it, and you can get away with the amount of water that you are supplied with for 2-3 days.
If you are particularly lazy (like me) I tend to not want to go into town every day, there is a truck that comes around daily (and more often in school holidays) that provides most of your basic needs. It has ice, bait and firewood. You can buy softdrinks and icecreams from them and milk and bread. So if you are well prepared you can sit and do nothing for as long as you like.
I can recommend hiring a camp more enthusiastically. I love the fact that I buy back the time I would ordinarily spend setting up. I love that camping for a weekend was out of the question, but now we can do exactly that. I love giving my kids a holiday that they deserve, free of technology, with the freedom that we had when my husband and I grew up. Better still I can have a relaxing holiday on a shoe string with all of the hard work done for me!
I’d love to hear about your experiences if you have camped at Inskip or surrounding areas.
For more info about hiring a camp see rainbowbeachhireacamp.com.au.