Your worst camping spot?

Camping is a wonderful experience generally, but sometimes things go awry. One of those things that seems most often to go South very quickly is the camping location. Maybe you're new and so didn't know not to pitch downstream - sadly it decided to rain and well... Maybe like me you discovered that some species of leeches are like lungfishes - I don't think I need to continue on that track. So what was the worse camping spot you ever happened to pick?

 

I've been lucky that way, never picked a spot that was that bad. We did set up a tent by the lake one time and a thunderstorm came through. Since we had picked a spot with a view of the water there was nothing to stop the wind blowing right at us.

We kept the tent up by standing and pushing against the side the wind was pushing on so the wind went around the tent.

 

I don't think I ever chose a terrible camping spot like that, but I do recall picking a terrible night to camp. It was myself, my mom, and a couple of friends. We went to a camping site near a lake, spent the day swimming and kayaking. About 8 PM it started to rain. By 11 PM it was raining so much and the wind was blowing so hard that we had to pack up the tent and go home. We thought the tents were going to blow into the lake! We actually tied the kayak to a tree and left it behind until the next day.

Turns out we were being hit with a tropical storm that night. Oops.

 

Another important point is to make sure the ground is not just pretending to be ground. As an aside might I say that leeches are awful creatures not improved by size or vibrant colorings. Also seeing a large number of them creep out of the ground was just so not kosher.

 

I once camped next to a downstream river and slept there during the night. I was woken up at midnight when water started flooding into my tent. A heavy storm approached during the night and it really increased the intensity of the river. I was lucky I didn't drown and am thankful I still have my life. Never went camping there again, and I'm sure you can imagine why.

 

I don't even know the name or location of my crappy camping spot because I've partly blocked it out as a bad part of my childhood. I was living in a group home at the time and the houseparents and social worker took us camping to an ugly campground devoid of charm. The grass was dead, there were no pretty water features to look at and the trees were nothing special. There was an outhouse and one of those wooden stand up showers. Everything about the experience was cheerless and lacking in color or excitement.

Looking back at it, I think those social workers were kind of douche-y for taking a bunch of abused and neglected children to a generic state park.
My later camping trips when I moved into a Christian foster home were more fun because church people are really good at weekend retreats and camping.

 

I can happily say that I have no been in a bad camping spot...yet

 

Maybe they were doing the best they could. It may seem like they're half-tailing it, but how much money and time did they really have? Were there discounts? How many kids went on this trip? Never mind how heavy the case loads are for the average social worker - or the burn out rate. Most quick early or dial out, and that's understandable because you can only take so many cases of child abuse before the world loses it's color.

 

A few years ago, my family and some of our friends decided to go camping on some of their families land down by the river. You really needed to have a 4 wheel drive to go down to where we were, but one of our friends decided his car would be okay. The entrance to go down, was rocky and had ruts all the way down. You literally had to weave around the large ruts to avoid getting stuck. Once we got to the bottom, we set up tents. The first night went really good. However, by morning we could hear thunder off in the distance. We decided since we had 6 kids between all of us, we should just pack up stuff and go home. We figured we had plenty of time. How wrong we were, before everyone could get all the tents down it started to pour down rain. We got what we could and started our way up the dreaded hill. Needless to say, it was a large mud hill with rocks. We got stuck 3 times, and our friend who took the car, bottomed his car out in a rut. We had to leave the car. It ended up raining off and on for a couple of days. After 4 days we went to help get our friends car out, and to get the remaining items we left at the camp. When we got to site, camp was gone covered in water. I am so very glad we had kids with us, or we probably would have stayed.

 

@charity
Wow. That is awful - I mean I kind of expected this when you mentioned the route down, but still. Who advised the location, and why?

 

On my second camping excursion once my mom got remarried (not my second camping trip ever, I'd been camping countless times beforehand!), our camping site turned out to be on a hill! We managed to find a semi-flat area on which to pitch the tents, but the picnic table and fire pit provided for us were both visibly slanted at about a 30-degree angle. The weather forecast for the trip looked fine from every source we checked, but the first night there, it absolutely poured. My brothers' tent actually had the stakes washed out from beneath it, slid a few feet down, and got stuck in a disgusting pile of mud! Needless to say we got out of there pretty quick!

 

My boyfriend at the time and I picked a crappy spot allright. Well he picked it actually. But it was kind of out of the way, shaded, and not to far from the trail. So we go around exploring and just enjoying the day. Everything is great, we had everything all set up. We go to bed that night and we were in the tent for maybe ten minutes. it was not raining but kind of drizziling. So we start hearing thump, thump, thump, on the tent. And something is falling on it. We go out and it was a plague of tent worms....It was gross. They were all over the tent and all our chairs and camping equpiment and coolers we had outside. yuck.

 

This time me and my brother were camping in the middle of the forest and out of no where two giant snakes came towards us. We got up and ran, literally walking around for hours trying to figure whether to go back to the spot or to just stay in the current spot.

 

The question you ask about the worst camping spot brings back memories. I was just laughing about it with my brother on the phone the other day. We setup camp one year on top of this ant hill and I tell you they should bite the heck out of you.

 

I've been a camper my entire life, and this was the worst campground ever. The trains pass through almost constantly, all night long. And, the noise from the highway is also terrible. NOT a restful, peaceful camping experience. We were camping on dirt, with no natural ground cover. There are no fire pits - what they have are more like fire stoves, not open fires. There is absolutely nothing of any natural beauty within the site. mom, my little brother and i were in this cold pity my little brother since he kept on disturbing us he has been fearing trains since he was a child. my mom is allergists to dust all the night was complains. this place was important due to its location but any advantageous result i di not see any.

 

The worst place I've ever camped is anywhere in Buena Vista park in San Francisco. Our van broke down and we all ended up hitch hiking down to the city for a bit, while we looked for another vehicle. We were hitchhiking and broke so a hotel wasn't possible. We went up to the top of the park and started looking for places to sleep and everywhere we found was littered with various gross unmentionable things from porn magazines, used needles, used condoms. all kinds of nasty. We eventually found a nice place without too much trash, and spread our tarp out and made camp. We had been asleep maybe an hour when my dog started freaking out. We had been surrounded by raccoons who were steadily advancing on us. Those things were mean. I tossed a stick at one to try and scatter them, and I'm pretty sure the critter just snatched it out of the air. Golden Gate park has cops, and rats the size of small cats.

As far as bad camping spots actually in the woods, I've had to camp in a swamp before. I don't think there's anything worse than that. it's wet, there's mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds, snakes, muddy, everything that's bad. Glad I'm not in the marines anymore, I don't have to camp in stupid places anymore.

 

@lindsay365

So why exactly were you... well there? I mean if it looked so awful and didn't really have anything recommending it whatsoever... why stay there at all?

 

I've been on many, many camping trips in tents, and I recall most of those involving rain at least one day. So I'm definitely one of those people who seems to pick the wrong day to camp instead of the wrong location. Many of the places I camped were national or state parks, and I'm really not a fan of campgrounds that don't have real toilets. This is easily remedied by bringing a portable camping toilet, however, and the view in these campgrounds makes it worth it. The worst location I've ever been for camping, though, has been up near Lake Erie in a KOA campground of all places. This campground was great if you were in a cabin next to the little pond, but the tent lots were horrible. We ended up stuck in a remote area of the campground among old shrubs. There was no place to set up a fire and the scenery was bland. I also had a difficult time when I tried remote camping one time, but that is a different issue. I think any place can be a good place to camp as long as you can set up a campfire and you can enjoy nature while you're there. Avoiding rain is also great, but I'm still trying to figure that part out!