Most i've been out is 2 nights i'll be honest, but i'm willing to give longer a go, problem is i have a family to support 
Kipping out in the wilderness
- Thread starter Tony
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Come along to the amazing Summer Moot (21st July - 2nd August), a festival of bushcrafting and camping in a beautiful woodland PLEASE CLICK HERE for more information.
your not the only one! my outdoor excursions have taken a back burner this year due to my 4th and definitely last son being born,and my camping buddy very selfishly deciding to have a minor stroke (just kidding chris!).Most i've been out is 2 nights i'll be honest, but i'm willing to give longer a go, problem is i have a family to support
Don't know exactly, didn't count, several months on a sailing boat on several occasions. Loads of stories, some hilarious, some involving danger to life, all very educational. One of my favourite moments was a swan in the Dart estuary repeatedly trying to eat the purple fleece that I was wearing. No idea why it found it so attractive.
One of my most vivid memories wasn't actually part of a voyage at all. While sailing somewhere off the south coast of England I was called back to work (VHF telephone linkup in those days, no mobiles) because of some computer problem that urgently needed my attention. So I put into somewhere like Rye, can't remember exactly where, and went to the station to catch a train. Wherever it was, this seaside town had a sleepy little station and I bought a ticket and got on an almost empty train to London. In London I would have to change trains to get to Derbyshire.
When I got off the train in London, for an instant I was absolutely terrified by the massive throng of people rushing towards me, hell-bent on getting on that train before anybody else did.
I'm not kidding about this. I've lived in London. I've driven fast motorcycles. I've worked with high explosives. I've practiced engine failure procedures in an R22. I've even sailed a 21 foot wooden sloop over Brancaster Shallows in a northerly gale (definitely not recommended, even for the most experienced; my crewman started to sing hymns to keep his mind off things but when he got to 'Rock of Ages' I asked him to stop). And yet for an instant, looking at that crowd of expressionless faces storming towards me along the platform was the scariest moment I've ever experienced.
After I'd recovered from the fright I rationalized it away by telling myself that it was just because the pace of life is so different when you're in town from when you're out on the sea. But ever since that day, the feeling has never really left me that we're doing something wrong.
One of my most vivid memories wasn't actually part of a voyage at all. While sailing somewhere off the south coast of England I was called back to work (VHF telephone linkup in those days, no mobiles) because of some computer problem that urgently needed my attention. So I put into somewhere like Rye, can't remember exactly where, and went to the station to catch a train. Wherever it was, this seaside town had a sleepy little station and I bought a ticket and got on an almost empty train to London. In London I would have to change trains to get to Derbyshire.
When I got off the train in London, for an instant I was absolutely terrified by the massive throng of people rushing towards me, hell-bent on getting on that train before anybody else did.
I'm not kidding about this. I've lived in London. I've driven fast motorcycles. I've worked with high explosives. I've practiced engine failure procedures in an R22. I've even sailed a 21 foot wooden sloop over Brancaster Shallows in a northerly gale (definitely not recommended, even for the most experienced; my crewman started to sing hymns to keep his mind off things but when he got to 'Rock of Ages' I asked him to stop). And yet for an instant, looking at that crowd of expressionless faces storming towards me along the platform was the scariest moment I've ever experienced.
After I'd recovered from the fright I rationalized it away by telling myself that it was just because the pace of life is so different when you're in town from when you're out on the sea. But ever since that day, the feeling has never really left me that we're doing something wrong.
i did that once after a canal holiday when i was younger, spent 2 weeks doing a section of the cheshire ring and when we got off the boat we just could not face traffic!
people zooming around, it was like a different universe. we'd just spent two weeks ambling through countryside and locks, seeing birds and whatnot then found ourselves plonked in the middle of this speedy horror.
must be what the victorians felt when they first saw trains..
people zooming around, it was like a different universe. we'd just spent two weeks ambling through countryside and locks, seeing birds and whatnot then found ourselves plonked in the middle of this speedy horror.
must be what the victorians felt when they first saw trains..
John O'Groats to Lands End when I was 30.
52 days, of which 48 spent walking, just over 1000miles sleeping in barns, hedges and old crofters cottages ( in the highlands ) Just a tarp ( didn't have much money, me and a mate, £5 a day between us, wax cotton Belstaff jackets! )
Grew beards, lost weight, saw our own country, had fun.
My best.
Chris.
52 days, of which 48 spent walking, just over 1000miles sleeping in barns, hedges and old crofters cottages ( in the highlands ) Just a tarp ( didn't have much money, me and a mate, £5 a day between us, wax cotton Belstaff jackets! )
Grew beards, lost weight, saw our own country, had fun.
My best.
Chris.
Sure was Jon!
Followed it up a couple of years later with Wainwrights ' Coast to Coast' with a pack on my back again.
Had the sense of adding the width to the lenght!
.. Just got to go around the coastline now!
Cheers.
Chris.
Followed it up a couple of years later with Wainwrights ' Coast to Coast' with a pack on my back again.
Had the sense of adding the width to the lenght!
.. Just got to go around the coastline now!
Cheers.
Chris.
F
fiskman6666
Guest
twelve nights down in dorset ,chapmans pool area fishing ,getting cut off by tides and just fishing and living it ,small tent,meths primus and cooked what i caught or found on the beach ,great stuff but at 25 it was always going to be anyway .Caught merry hell from mum and g/f tho when i finally decided to go home lol.
Dave
Years ago I read about a trapper who lived somewhere in the barren lands in NWT in the 50's who never saw another person for 11 months of the year,
and it was figured that he was the only person in about a 10,000 square kilometer area for most of that time....and he remarkably remained sane...
and it was figured that he was the only person in about a 10,000 square kilometer area for most of that time....and he remarkably remained sane...
Great stuff!
Whether walking the hills and glens, out on "fishing trips", nosing around our ancient archaeology or just mooching about with no real purpose in mind, I've walked near enough the whole of Scotland.
I went to the sea as a boy and then into the oilfields, so have done a lot of travelling internationally. The oilfields gave me the luxury of unrealistic amounts of cash but the real Rat-Trap was working 4 weeks on and 4 off, which allowed me to go wherever and do whatever I felt like doing for 6 months of the year, which normally involved stravaiging in mountainous country somewhere on Mother Earth.
There is one delightful 3 months which is branded on my memory though. Aged about 21, I took a job with a crowd contracting to the Forestry Commission near Aberfeldy. They were a rather scary looking bunch of misfits but they were all good lads who'd have taken the shirts off their backs to give me.
They lived in an array of caravans, a camper and one lad who was about 6'2" slept in a Fiat 126, which the other lads called "The Hen Hut"! I lived for most of that time in my wee Force Ten tent at a variety of stunning locations.
At 6' 0" tall, I was the shortest. They called me The Poison Dwarf, as apparently I had a short-arses bad attitude!
The problems arose when I went home to my parents for a weekend and my dad started interrogating me as to what I was doing. I told him as much as I thought was wise but all that did was arouse his curiosity even further. My job was to hook up cut timber to the chains and drag it down the hill to a stacking point where it was loaded onto trucks. It was the answer to "Drag it with what?", that did the damage... "A horse, dad!" (Although I was never sure whether the horse, Dobbin The C#nt, handled me or I handled him. At 5 pm on the dot he would stop and refuse to move until I unchained his load, at which he'd canter straight to his horse-box.)
My dad leapt straight from "horse" to "Show me your Forestry Commission pay-lines!"
I'll never lose the image of my dad sitting with his head in his hands saying...
"Ye'll be happy now. Ye'r a bliddy Wid Tink!"
(A Wood Tinker - an itinerant forestry worker)
Whether walking the hills and glens, out on "fishing trips", nosing around our ancient archaeology or just mooching about with no real purpose in mind, I've walked near enough the whole of Scotland.
I went to the sea as a boy and then into the oilfields, so have done a lot of travelling internationally. The oilfields gave me the luxury of unrealistic amounts of cash but the real Rat-Trap was working 4 weeks on and 4 off, which allowed me to go wherever and do whatever I felt like doing for 6 months of the year, which normally involved stravaiging in mountainous country somewhere on Mother Earth.
There is one delightful 3 months which is branded on my memory though. Aged about 21, I took a job with a crowd contracting to the Forestry Commission near Aberfeldy. They were a rather scary looking bunch of misfits but they were all good lads who'd have taken the shirts off their backs to give me.
They lived in an array of caravans, a camper and one lad who was about 6'2" slept in a Fiat 126, which the other lads called "The Hen Hut"! I lived for most of that time in my wee Force Ten tent at a variety of stunning locations.
At 6' 0" tall, I was the shortest. They called me The Poison Dwarf, as apparently I had a short-arses bad attitude!
The problems arose when I went home to my parents for a weekend and my dad started interrogating me as to what I was doing. I told him as much as I thought was wise but all that did was arouse his curiosity even further. My job was to hook up cut timber to the chains and drag it down the hill to a stacking point where it was loaded onto trucks. It was the answer to "Drag it with what?", that did the damage... "A horse, dad!" (Although I was never sure whether the horse, Dobbin The C#nt, handled me or I handled him. At 5 pm on the dot he would stop and refuse to move until I unchained his load, at which he'd canter straight to his horse-box.)
My dad leapt straight from "horse" to "Show me your Forestry Commission pay-lines!"
I'll never lose the image of my dad sitting with his head in his hands saying...
"Ye'll be happy now. Ye'r a bliddy Wid Tink!"
(A Wood Tinker - an itinerant forestry worker)
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Three weeks wildcamping along the pennine way is the longest, and a few 1 or 2 week jaunts is about it for me
14 years old, one week in lake district on my own.......
Hitch hiking, pup tent that didnt know how to erect, tried to pretend I was 16!
Felt like thrity years!
Got wet, (Limefit Park!) wimped out caught a train to my aunties in Warrington was in 1973.
When I was 17yrs old hitch hicked around all of Ireland wearing a 3 piece suit, a tan flasher mac and a small suitcase..... smashing!
My eldest daughter will be 14 in April next year..... Would I allow her to do it.............. You must be joking!
She got an even bigger adventure coming, Boarding school!
Alan L.
Hitch hiking, pup tent that didnt know how to erect, tried to pretend I was 16!
Felt like thrity years!
Got wet, (Limefit Park!) wimped out caught a train to my aunties in Warrington was in 1973.
When I was 17yrs old hitch hicked around all of Ireland wearing a 3 piece suit, a tan flasher mac and a small suitcase..... smashing!
My eldest daughter will be 14 in April next year..... Would I allow her to do it.............. You must be joking!
She got an even bigger adventure coming, Boarding school!
Alan L.
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Great stuff!
Whether walking the hills and glens, out on "fishing trips", nosing around our ancient archaeology or just mooching about with no real purpose in mind, I've walked near enough the whole of Scotland.
I went to the sea as a boy and then into the oilfields, so have done a lot of travelling internationally. The oilfields gave me the luxury of unrealistic amounts of cash but the real Rat-Trap was working 4 weeks on and 4 off, which allowed me to go wherever and do whatever I felt like doing for 6 months of the year, which normally involved stravaiging in mountainous country somewhere on Mother Earth.
There is one delightful 3 months which is branded on my memory though. Aged about 21, I took a job with a crowd contracting to the Forestry Commission near Aberfeldy. They were a rather scary looking bunch of misfits but they were all good lads who'd have taken the shirts off their backs to give me.
They lived in an array of caravans, a camper and one lad who was about 6'2" slept in a Fiat 126, which the other lads called "The Hen Hut"! I lived for most of that time in my wee Force Ten tent at a variety of stunning locations.
At 6' 0" tall, I was the shortest. They called me The Poison Dwarf, as apparently I had a short-arses bad attitude!
The problems arose when I went home to my parents for a weekend and my dad started interrogating me as to what I was doing. I told him as much as I thought was wise but all that did was arouse his curiosity even further. My job was to hook up cut timber to the chains and drag it down the hill to a stacking point where it was loaded onto trucks. It was the answer to "Drag it with what?", that did the damage... "A horse, dad!" (Although I was never sure whether the horse, Dobbin The C#nt, handled me or I handled him. At 5 pm on the dot he would stop and refuse to move until I unchained his load, at which he'd canter straight to his horse-box.)
My dad leapt straight from "horse" to "Show me your Forestry Commission pay-lines!"
I'll never lose the image of my dad sitting with his head in his hands saying...
"Ye'll be happy now. Ye'r a bliddy Wid Tink!"
(A Wood Tinker - an itinerant forestry worker)
longest time spent in a tent was 1.5 months whilst in the andes. god i hated that thing by the end of it. longest trek ive been on is a good couple of months without a break. longest time spent backpacking was
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2.5 weeks through the Pyrenees is my longest. A combination of camping and mountain refuges/huts. Fantastic time. At the end of the walk we were in a Spanish town called Benasque. On the evening we went to town, got drunk and decided Portugal was our next stop!
From NE Spain to Lisbon takes 27 hours by coach. This is a long time when one of your Goretex boots gets filled with rainwater...
Aaahh, Halogen days...
Jay
From NE Spain to Lisbon takes 27 hours by coach. This is a long time when one of your Goretex boots gets filled with rainwater...
Aaahh, Halogen days...
Jay
I've been cycling around the world for the last two years mainly living out of my tent. I'm just about out of the Rockies now and heading to Canada for a few days and then re-enter the US (if they let me back in...) and then I'm cycling down to Mexico.
www.acousticmotorbike.com
www.acousticmotorbike.com
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