Vintage Trailer Camping

A quick camping trip in a vintage trailer – a 1959 Dalton “canned ham” and our easy camping menu for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Those of you who’ve been reading AOC awhile may remember (from long ago) that we own a cute little vintage trailer – a Dalton “canned ham” circa 1957 (or ’59 – we’re not sure).

We have many sweet memories of trips in our trailer, though we actually haven’t gone camping in more than a year for a variety of reasons. The main one being that our kids were working most of the summer, so arranging things like camping trips takes some doing.

I was determined, though, that we would camp before the summer ended. And with the deadline looming (our son moves back to campus today!), we dusted her off and hightailed it up to a beautiful creek a mere 45 minutes away to get our “summer camping fix.”

Brice Creek is such a nice area to have so close – the main hiking trail winds along the creek, which is full of picturesque little falls and swimming holes.

It’s also some of the clearest water there is – we easily saw trout swimming about among the rocks and boulders.

And it’s also some of the coldest. Sheesh – we saw teens wearing bikinis and suits walking down from the trail leading to the biggest pool, but after getting my feet numb in the first 30 seconds, I decided they had spent their time sunning on the rocks and NOT freezing in the water.

Brian and our daughter did challenge each other to dunk in – but I was not tempted one iota. No siree.

We love our little trailer, and we were reminded again how easy it is to camp with. We just load the food and pack our clothes in the closet and off we go.

I’ve learned to keep food really simple when camping.

• We grilled burgers when we arrived and served them with chips and some fresh salsa I made earlier.
• Breakfast consisted of fried-egg-and-cheese-sandwiches with fruit and zucchini bread.
• Lunch was sandwiches.

When we keep it simple, no one spends a lot of time cooking or cleaning up, so we all get to enjoy the camping experience.

The food highlight for me, though, was being able to use a thrift store cast iron griddle on the camp stove for the first time to fry the eggs. Oh my goodness, did it make frying six eggs SO much easier! I’m so glad I coughed up the $17 for it – it was worth every penny.