We hit summer really hard
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What is up with us and summertime? As full-timers, we camp in literally every season. We've faced triple-digit temperatures, all the way down to below-zero temperatures. Naturally, we need to adjust the way we live in order to handle those extremes, but of all the seasons, summer hits us differently. We assume it has something to do with the flocks of seasonal campers who begin taking their weekend trips in their RV, ready for three months of fun and relaxation. Or perhaps it's that every campground is open, rather than us scrounging around for the year-round locations, so we can have our pick of whichever camping experience we wish: RV resort, wilderness primitive site, and anything in between. It also goes without saying that we like the outdoors, and summertime yields recreational opportunities that have us itching to breathe in the warm, fresh air.
Last year, we upped our summer game by doing this:
The patio has since undergone a few iterations, including getting a new sun shade. We love our patio, to the point where we often don’t utilize the other outdoor areas of our campsites. The convenience of being able to expand our space and walk right outside without leaving the RV, is priceless.
We’re certainly not those campers who show up to a site and lay out the world’s amount of outdoor stuff. That’s just not how we spend our time. If we’re going to be outside and not on our patio, we tend to just use the provided picnic table or our camping chairs. Once upon a time, we did also have our Alvantor tent, a screen tent that provided some shade and respite from the insects. If you haven’t seen it lately in any of our pictures, that’s because we don’t have it anymore. We lost it. Yes, we lost a giant screen tent and have no idea how.
We really liked the Alvantor and I had debated buying another one, but something kept holding me back. What if I’d rather dive deeper into our outdoor space? After we left our RV park near Glacier, our travels would take us back south, through Montana once again. Our Montana campsites were extraordinary thus far – some of the best sites we’ve ever had in our year and a half of RVing. I had already booked a site for a couple days after leaving Glacier. It was one of those times where we were mostly keeping our itinerary open, but I happened upon an available campsite that I couldn’t refuse. Two days after leaving Glacier, two nights were available at Lolo National Forest, at a small recreation area on the shores of Lake Alva. One site of six was available, only it was a group site. Oftentimes, group sites have a minimum number of people, and the two of us don’t quite cut it. This campsite, however, didn’t care how many people camped, as long as we were OK paying the higher price for the larger site. The price ended up being double what a standard site would be, but the campsite looked enormous and amazing. The price wasn’t any higher than what we typically pay at RV parks, and so I booked it. Since that day, I thought about that site a lot. It was the one thing that was keeping me excited to leave Glacier and continue on with our travels. We’d not only have ample parking space for our RV, but we’d also have the main camping area, complete with three tent sites, three picnic tables, a firepit, and lake access. Clearly that’s way more room than we needed, but I kept thinking about ways to maximize it. Did I want to get a tent? Like, an actual tent? Would I use it? Would it be worth setting it up and taking it down? Mind you, Anthony and I have never been real campers. Glampers, sure, but neither of us had even pitched a tent before. I was a Girl Scout for one year, and during that time, the only camping trips I took involved us staying in giant tent-like shelters, not individual tents.
There were advantages to buying a camping tent. Even if we didn’t want to sleep in it, it would be more impervious to the weather elements than our Alvantor. We could keep it up in the rain and it would hopefully have better stakes to keep it from blowing over in the wind. The tent itself has always provided us with a little extra space away from the RV. Since Anthony and I both work, there are lots of times where we have to dial into meetings at the same time, or even worse, he has a meeting and I need quiet to record. Sometimes Anthony finds it easier to just sit in the truck instead of staying quiet when I’m in my mobile studio, which isn’t really fair.
The disadvantages were making enough room for it in our already limited storage space, and not knowing how often we’d actually be able to use it. Some campgrounds specifically don’t allow tents and RVs in the same site, and in some sites, we simply wouldn’t want to pitch a tent anyway. But Lolo! Lolo was ready to welcome a tent, or two, or three, with open arms.
I sat tight on the purchase, but I did occasionally research camping tents to decide which would be most fitting for our needs. The end of our Glacier stay was drawing near, and I still didn’t have a site to fill the two days between Glacier and Lolo. I headed into my trip planner to see what was available. It would be a weekend stay, so I wasn’t taking any chances without a reservation.
Montana Route 83 passes by a lot of lakes, including Lake Alva, where we’d be staying at Lolo. A smaller lake further south is Salmon Lake, which has a state park with some RV campsites. I found an available site at the state park, but it seemed perplexing. It was the only available site left, which could mean someone canceled, or it could mean everyone knows something I don’t. The state park campground is set up in two loops…if we can call it that. Really, it’s one loop that houses the campsites, the camp host, the information station, and the dumpsters. The other “loop,” which I affectionately termed the “reject loop,” houses two sites and a vault toilet, and it’s situated way up the road! The last remaining available site was in the reject loop, and it wasn’t really a site that you pull or back into. It was basically a widening of the road that became the parking for the site, not unlike the parallel parking site we had at Joshua Tree. Only this site was way bigger. It also had an amazing picnic pavilion and lake access. The website said that it had space enough for an RV and two tents. I mulled it over for a while, wondering if this quirky site was awesome or just plain weird. But we’ve enjoyed wonky sites in the past, and we can handle weird parking jobs, so why not give it a go? I booked the site at Salmon Lake, and now we had four nights in a row, lakefront, in what could be the best summer wilderness excursion we’ve ever had.
Hopes were high, but instead of just hoping for the nice site and enjoying it with what we already own, I took these availabilities as a sign from the universe that it was time to go all-in with summer awesomeness. I had been eyeing this floaty lounge since 2021, before we launched. I’d stare at it for hours on my computer, wondering if I could justify such a purchase for use at only a few campsites, at best. Having not hit the road yet, I made a deal with myself to see what kind of campsites we end up at, make a note of which ones would allow for the floaty, and decide later. I’m always thinking about amount of usage we’ll get, amount of space it’ll take up in storage, and the ease of setting up and taking down. That’s why we love our patio. We’ve gotten our routine down so efficiently that it only takes us 3 minutes to set up – 5ish more if we put down our patio mat or put up the sun shade. We know ourselves; anything that takes more than about 10 minutes to set up won’t be worth our time.
In musing about this floaty for two years, I also wondered if it was durable enough to use on land. We don’t often have water access sites, and so would I be able to blow it up and use it on grass, or sand, or maybe even the patio? Upon looking at the Amazon page in 2023, I got some answers. It seems as though Intex, the brand that makes the floaty, has continually improved the material of their product, and so lots of customers were saying they were able to use it as a normal lounger, not on water, and it’s held up fine. That’s what I needed to know. I wouldn’t buy the floaty for just four lakefront nights (though I’d be tempted), but if I could use it on land, that would open up a lot of doors. I thought back to all our previous campsites where I would have used the floaty as a lounger, and there were quite a few. Now the only real way to know its durability would be to purchase it and test it out ourselves. There’s no better place than lakeside in the wilderness of Montana.
The floaty purchase gave me a lot of momentum, and so it was back to contemplating that tent. I talked it over with Anthony, and we decided that, if we were going to buy it, we should buy it now. We’re able to get packages to our Glacier campground, and we know we’ll have two opportunities to try the tent right away, so if we didn’t like it, we could issue a return. I already had a sense of which one I wanted, and it’d be a little bit large, but it would fit us both and would come with a cot and sleep pad, all of which supposedly pack away easily into a storage bag. The cot was an added plus because we thought about its uses even when we don’t want to pitch the tent. Sometimes it would be nice to just have a lounger. But we’d have to see how easy it was to set up and how comfortable it is. Again, only things we can discover by testing it out ourselves. The specific item I ended up buying was from Wayfair, but I’ve seen similar ones on Amazon for similar prices. I only bought the one from Wayfair because it had slightly better reviews and we had time for it to ship and still arrive to Mountain Meadow, our Glacier campground, before we left.
So there we were, leaving Glacier with our new purchases, ready to kick off our summer, lake style. Campsite #1, our Salmon Lake State Park site in the reject loop, was so wonderfully wonky. We pulled ourselves into our non-demarcated parking area and had views straight out to the lake – the lakefront that was basically our own private shore because the only things in this entire section of the park were the two reject sites and the toilet. No one came down there unless they had a reason or were just taking a walk. We also had no neighbors the entire time we were there. People had reserved the site, but no one showed up. This meant that not only did we have this gorgeous campsite, we had the entire area all to ourselves. It was so quiet and peaceful.
The lakefront access was perfect to test my floaty for the first time, and I immediately fell in love. I had also purchased corkscrew sand anchors and a bungee to keep me from floating adrift. Sitting on that floaty, the lake washed all my stresses away. I actually felt like I was enjoying summer the way campers do. I discovered that, in the right place, with the right products, I could take a mini-summer vacation in my full-time nomadic life.
Our first full day at Salmon Lake, we unpacked the tent and set it up. Just imagine what it’s like for a 35- and 36-year-old to pitch a tent for the first time ever, using an instruction manual that may as well have had only one instruction that read, “Pitch the tent.” Needless to say, it took a little longer than the maximum 10 minutes we set for ourselves, but we assumed we’d get faster with practice. The tent itself though, has a lot of great features. Everything we wanted from our tent – extra space, weather resistance, and ease of storage – was there. It was also pretty cozy for coming with a stock sleep pad. We also really got to see how it held up to weather when it downpoured that night. Everything stayed dry.
We weren’t quite ready to pack the tent into its storage bag, just to pitch it again at Lolo, so when it came time to drive back up 83, we just kept the tent intact and shoved it into our trailer through our ramp door. That way we had immediate usage as soon as we got to Lolo.
Now, what can I say about Lolo, besides the fact that I’d pay double the price for this campsite time and time again? Despite all my research and looking at pictures, this site exceeded my expectations. We literally had a private forest all to ourselves for two nights, complete with tall, aromatic pine trees, the gorgeous lake, and even our own hiking path! If there is Heaven on Earth, this is it.
We took every advantage of this campsite. I spent my days floating and soaking in the nature. I wore my swim romper all day long. Anthony did work from the tent as Tanner laid in the cool dirt next to him. We set up our camping chairs and kept them out the whole time, which we never do, and we had a lovely campfire, watching the sunset over the lake, and the bats come out at dusk, and seeing Lily’s reaction to these new, strange “birds.” I took my morning walks on the hiking path and national forest road – open only to us campers – and the distance between us and the adjacent campsites was close to a mile in one direction, and about 100 yards in the other. In other words, only one other camping family was even in our line of sight, and just barely.
On our first night, I did the unthinkable. I slept in the tent. I knew there’d be no better time or place, and we might as well test out all aspects before the return period ends. But tent camping alone was certainly not on my list of likely activities for this year. My back oftentimes doesn’t even like beds, let alone stock sleeping pads, and I’d be exposing myself to lows in the 40s with only one legit camping blanket. Those were really the two major struggles, but both could be solved with a good, padded sleeping bag. I slept about 5 hours, waking up a few times here and there, so it wasn’t the most successful night, but it had its perks. I got to hear loon calls for the first time. So strange to say that, considering I’m a New England girl who has spent tons of time in New Hampshire and Maine, and yet, their calls have eluded me. It’s been a bucket list goal for years to finally hear their wail – a call that many mistake for a wolf or coyote howl. Around midnight, alone in the tent, the wails echoed through the mountains. Then, just before dusk, they bellowed again. A little while later, during my very early morning walk, their tremolos joined the dawn chorus of birds, like the finale of the morning’s performance. Montana has about half the loon population as New Hampshire and even smaller a percentage than Maine, and yet, it was here in Montana that I got to experience this mesmerizing wonder that I had hoped for for so long. That, plus the satisfaction of trying something new and out of my comfort zone, made my tent sleep worthwhile…but I think I’ll stick with glamping most nights.
The camping vibe in summer brings a lovely juxtaposition of fun, active recreation and peaceful, contemplative relaxation. We often find ourselves in the RV parks, vibing off of the former, but during these four days, we realized how important it is for us to slow down and really enjoy the camping life. It was four days of sunscreen and bug spray, little cell connectivity, and just us and the beauty that Montana offers. There’s no place we would have rather been.