What I Would Do if I Created an Innovative Camping Tool

Laura's left to go camping this weekend, which of course means that I was enlisted to help her pack up.

As she was short on time, I helped her get ready for her trip. Chopping onions for her dinner, gathering flashlights and other necessary items, and notifying her friends via text of her immanent absence were just a few things I did to help out. Nothing too hard.

One thing which I did struggle to help her with, though, was stuffing her tent into a bag half the size that I feel it should have been.

Anyone who's been camping (and I mean REAL camping, not lame-ass "camping" in a trailer) will know that it's always a struggle to fit all your supplies in your bag. One thing you have to do to achieve this is roll your sleeping bag, tent, and other similar items into tiny shapes before stuffing them into compact bags. These bags save room in your pack, but their nearly impossible to get your stuff into.

When stuffing Laura's tent into one such bag today, it was a grim scene. For ten minutes or so I struggled. First I gingerly stuffed the edge of the cloth down deep into the bag. More and more of the tenting followed, filling the bag up to the very top. The problem? Only half of the cloth had actually gone in, meaning that I then had to try to jam the rest into an already full back.

My heart rate elevated as I tried all sorts of athletic positions to stabilize the bag as I shoved. I kicked, I pushed, I yanked. For far too long I struggled to push the damn thing into a fairly small opening at one end of the bag.

That's when I thought to myself there must be a better way to do this. 

And then it hit me.

The problem with stuffing something into a long, slim bag is that the part of the bag near the opening will inevitably become much more compact then that on the opposite end. There's always some spare room in the opposite end of the bag. The problem is, that's inaccessible.  But why does it have to be?

The way I figure it, tent-bag designers could fix all of our problems if they made the bags zip-up. If they were, you could unzip the bag so that both ends were accessible to you. You could then scrunch the tent up, lay it along the bag so that there's an equal amount of cloth on either end, and then just force the zipper up. Done.

I tell you, if you can make this happen then please do. If you don't then someday I will.

Thanks for reading this (unedited due to extreme tiredness) post.

-Mark