Yet Another Cycling Forum
General Category => The Knowledge => Camping It Up => Topic started by: Graymee on 18 March, 2012, 02:34:44 pm
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What features would you like to find on a camp site whilst on a cycle tour? Features I'd like to see are:
Value for money - I don't want to pay the same price for me and Mrs Graymee in a 2 person tent that a family of 5 would pay for their caravan with electric hook up occupying 4+ times the area.
Good showers that you don't have to pay extra for.
A basic shelter that you can prepare and cook food in if it's pouring with rain.
Relatively flat, well drained pitch. - I don't like camping in a quagmire.
Please add other cyclist friendly features you think add value to a site.
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Decent loos, obviously, with toilet paper that doesn't disintegrate in your bits.
Water taps that aren't a huge trek from your pitch (can get tedious if you only have a couple of bottles).
Something good to lock your bike to.
Somewhere to charge your gadgets is a bonus.
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What features would you like to find on a camp site whilst on a cycle tour? Features I'd like to see are:
Value for money - I don't want to pay the same price for me and Mrs Graymee in a 2 person tent that a family of 5 would pay for their caravan with electric hook up occupying 4+ times the area.
Good showers that you don't have to pay extra for.
A basic shelter that you can prepare and cook food in if it's pouring with rain.
Relatively flat, well drained pitch. - I don't like camping in a quagmire.
Please add other cyclist friendly features you think add value to a site.
IME the Camping & Caravan Club meet the majority of those requirements
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Quiet (as in little noise)
No midges or mosquitoes.
Restricted car parking - so you don't have to worry about some twonk running over your bikes when they are driving back to their tent/caravan after they've been to the pub.
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The Camping and Caravanning club sites are extortionate- the one in Luss, Loch Lomond charged us GBP 48 for two nights. We had one small tent and two motorbikes.
Ideally, picnic tables near tent pitches so you have someplace to sit, and a drying room in a good facilities block. Hairdryers are also a real bonus, as they mean you neither go to bed or set off with wet hair. I also like someplace nearby which does good cheap food.
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The Camping and Caravanning club sites are extortionate- the one in Luss, Loch Lomond charged us GBP 48 for two nights. We had one small tent and two motorbikes.
That seems ridiculous.
The cost for a cyclist & a tent is £8 per night.
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On the whole, any camp site which hasn't gone caravans-only is welcome.
But beyond that: a friendly reception if you arrive fairly late in the evening, and a good website to aid discoverability if you find your first choice hasn't worked out and you need to track down another one using a flaky mobile data connection.
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No midges or mosquitoes.
Ah, if we're playing that game, pitches that aren't surrounded by vast swathes of allergy-inducing flora. There's a wheezy weekend in the New Forest that I'm not going to forget in a hurry.
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+1 for the gadget charging opportunities.
Other than that I'm not usually on site long enough to bother about much else.
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1. Quiet
2. A decent warden to enforce quiet when idiots start being noisy late at night
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A dog-walking area well away from the tent field >:(
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TTIUW earwigs.
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Flat pitches on decent ground, not full of stones.
Decent quality showers and loos.
Tents in a 'car free' zone.
Good shady pitch prospects.
Decent local 'basics' shop
No dogs, on a lead or stray.
Children and curious adult free.
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Aren't we all a bit curious?
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I like the ability to have a camp fire and actually prefer sites that are almost wild camping but with loos.
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The Camping and Caravanning club sites are extortionate- the one in Luss, Loch Lomond charged us GBP 48 for two nights. We had one small tent and two motorbikes.
That seems ridiculous.
The cost for a cyclist & a tent is £8 per night.
It comes of being motorised.
On a bike, you count as a backpacker, cost £5.65 to £8.75, depending on season and whether you are a member or not.
If you are a regular motorised camper, it's something like £8pppn, plus £3 or £4 for the pitch, plus a non-member fee of £7 or so. This does make it expensive, and also makes it worth while joining up quite quickly.
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1. Quiet
2. A decent warden to enforce quiet when idiots start being noisy late at night
Couldn't agree more. A decent pub within walking distance is handy as well.
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No dogs, on a lead or stray.
Children and curious adult free.
Goodness. Really? I quite like other people, and their dogs and children, as long as they're well behaved.
I like my fellow campers to be well behaved, the showers to be extant, hot & watery and the loos to flush and not smell.
Apart from that, anything else is a bonus.
O, and I want it to be CHEAP.
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Having anyone from this parish in residence would make it nice. :thumbsup:
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If the neighbours are going to have sex in their tent - they should at least be entertaining and it should be noisy. The lady in the nearby tent at Worcester last year was a right squealer.
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I am surprised no one has mentioned non surly proprieters.
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Looking at the matter in reverse by recalling camps that have stayed memorable after many years:
Slopes not to be so extreme that you slide out of your sleeping bag / tent / both during the night.
Absence of enormous clumps of grass / thistles spaced at centres that make it inevitable that at least three lie beneath your tent be it an ever so tiny tent.
Sufficient depth of soil to get pegs in - one camp turned out to be a veneer of soil over a former army parade ground - had to place the pgs in at 10 degrees to the horizontal.
Absence of moles - on a French site friend in next tnet could be heard thrashing around in the nights as he kept being woken up for reasons unknown - when we struck tents to leave, turned out eight or ten mole hills had risen beneath his tent during our one week stay - and there were no mole hills anywhere else on the site...
Absence of Culicodes heliophilus and C.impunctatus*
Sufficiently firm entry to the site off the road that it does not become necessary for every single vehicle to be towed out by a tractor after a weekend of rain.
No throbing portable generators run by some inconsiderate campers (there will be a special place in one of the innermost circles of the inferno awaiting them :demon:).
Absence of airport runway on the other side of the boundary fence - we arrived late at night to blissful silence and were awoken at dawn by the first jet of the day passing about twenty feet above our tent :facepalm:
Absence of a enormous gathering of mods in the next field who spent the weekend incinerating plastic and other noxious materials and accumulating many skip'sworths of empty cans in an all-day-all-night drinking and quarrelling orgy :-[
Absence of the heaviest rainstorm of the last couple of decades, resulting in water deep enough to submerge a mess tin inside the tent and a friend floating about on an airbed inside his tent :'(
Strange how the nice pleasant campsites blur from accurate recall whilst the ghastly campsites stand out for ever in perfect, horrifying detail.... ;)
* The much-feared Scottish midge.
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The wife and I came up with the following criteria:
WILD CAMPS:
Drinking water
Picnic bench or other seating
Away from roads and houses (bit of privacy for non-discovery and toileting)
Sheltered from wind
Extra bonus points for swimming pools/lakes, somewhere to hide bikes/kit to bugger off sunbathing/swimming nearby, ice cream vendors, and a good view.
PROPER CAMP SITES:
Cheap
Flushing toilet + bog roll
Showers without timers
Something to lock bikes to
Not full of workers who play boule near your tent until 1am.
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Amen to showers without timers!
Otherwise what makes a good campsite depends, for example if out for a few days or several consecutive wet days, washing and drying machines.
A view is always welcome.
A balance of friendliness and peace and quiet.
Oh and that it is just there at the right time can make a tawdry campsite more than welcome ie towards the end of a long day, when you start to thing "I must look out for a campsite" and you turn a corner and there on is! This happened to me in a place called Fritton when I was from Lowestoft towards Thetford. The site had the cleanest toilets and showers I have ever seen and the landlady came over while I was just setting up and said "We are just going for a take away would you like fish and chips?" more or less made my evening!
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Quiet, cheap, small, no kids, no caravans (just tents and motorhomes), free showers, and a complementary tray of tea and biccys while you put your tent up.
(and yes, it exists. I'm not telling though, i want it to have at least one free pitch when i want to go!)
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I am surprised no one has mentioned non surly proprieters.
I haven't met surly ones. Hard to find ones, and useless ones, yes. Mostly cheery ones, though - the "Och, there's always room for a wee tentie!" variety.
For me: low road noise and a good bog block. But my needs were aligned with get-clean-get-to-bed-get-going.
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Ones that always reserve a few pitches for latecoming walkers and cyclists. Even when they are full already.
Other than that: Quiet.
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A toilet and a hot shower is kind of my baseline. And a flat pitch. I can't sleep well when I'm sweaty/mucky.
Somewhere to charge stuff. Washing-up facilities are a nice luxury.