Plush camping
Aug.21, 2008, filed under Miscellany
I have a suspected stress fracture in my right foot and this year’s weather appears to be mostly flooding. So Frood decided our imminent annual camping trip must be a departure from our usual bike-based, lightweight style. It shall be ‘plush’.
To this end this morning (we were supposed to leave today but there are flood warnings for the Highlands) we drove down to Tisos in Leith and purchased ourselves one of these:
I felt an odd sense of betrayal. My lightweight, kit-fetish, gear-geek nature was offended that I should be buying this great hunk of appliance weighing nearly 6kg (which is about 3 times the weight of our tent, and nearly as much as my Pinarello weighs). Why was I purchasing this monstrosity of a stove when right next to it was the Primus Himalaya Omni-Fuel, complete with wooden presentation box: a spider-web light, steampunk joy of a thing that can burn anything you throw at it except possibly yak dung? Why was I turning my back on my MSR Pocket Rocket, nestled so snugly within my MSR titanium mug? Why was I spending what strikes me as being a small fortune to get something for which I also needed to buy a gas cylinder I won’t be able to use with anything else and yet which cost about as much as the stove?
Was I doing this just for toast? I don’t even eat toast! And we have a toasty thing for our other stove anyway!
Dammit, I own a titanium spork!
“We’re going plush camping,” Frood told me. “And you know what else it will be good for?”
Of course! The Dumb Run! Never mind disposable barbies and sossajes: we can do bacon and egg butties on the beach at St Andrews with this! That should see us to the end, even if we are bringing about Armegeddon.
Well, that’s all right then.