We recently added a new hobby to our permanent repertoire. The stereotype of a Seattleite is a crunchy, liberal, outdoors person…and I must admit that’s pretty much accurate 🙂 . In Manhattan weekend activities included going to bars, going to bottomless mimosa brunch and complaining about your week. It was a bit of culture shock when we moved to Seattle because weekends are completely different.
I wake up on a Saturday at 10am and lounge about happily. I might scroll through Instagram only to discover: one of my friends has already climbed a nearby mountain. Another is crabbing in Puget Sound. Another is whale watching while kayaking in the San Juans. WHAAAT?! Nature was not a consideration in Manhattan….at all. Even Central Park doesn’t feel like real nature with its skyscrapers constantly hanging in the distance, the nearby sound of sirens and the literal million people who are 5 feet from you on a nice day.
In New York we never considered renting a car and getting into nature a real possibility for several reasons: 1. I’m terrified of driving in NYC and refuse to do it. 2. Nature around NYC is not very pretty – especially worth dying over. It starts getting really beautiful about 4 hours away which is further than I’m willing to drive for a quick weekend getaway.
In Seattle nature is literally everywhere. We live in a normal apartment near the heart of town and I feel like we live in a treehouse. In NYC the only bird I saw were pigeons eating cigarettes on the sidewalk. We’ve been in Seattle two and a half years and I keep seeing all different kinds of birds outside of our window. In fact, we have a hummingbird living in one of our trees! Absolutely beautiful. We have Mt. Rainier hanging out in the distance – mountains and water in every direction. There’s beauty outside our window and even more of it an hour or two away.
So we deciding to give outdoorsmenship a go. I went on a camping trip with my Park Ranger friend C to Olympic National Park and it was amazingly gorgeous. Since she’s outdoorsy and actually studied what I jokingly call “hippie science” she had all the gear for us. The next camping trip I rented my gear, which was surprisingly cheap and easy to do in Seattle. After that Amazon was having a sale on camping gear so we ran the numbers and it made more sense to buy our gear instead of rent it based on how many camping trips I had gone on that year. So we bought our own gear. Personally I paid about $100 to buy everything we need for camping: a comfy tent, a nice sleeping bag and a sleeping pad. Not bad.
So it cost money, but a lot less than a flight to someplace beautiful. The gear was reasonable, the campsite fees are low ($10-35 total split amongst us) and rental cars are very cheap in Seattle ($20/day). Overall camping has become a nice low-budget mini-vacation activity. I’ve seen absolutely beautiful places and explored our wild state. I’m really glad we went out on a climb and tried it. Now to come up with a pre-test to see if people are compatible camping partners before wasting a weekend in hell :). I’ll think about that for next time.