One beauty of driving is to take the vehicle and go to faraway places to spend time with nature. At any moment, with a car, this is possible. Here’s a gallery of such images.
As with many previous posts, most of these images from the web had no information. A few did: the black and white Squareback was shot in the UK, and the blue one in France. The second to last comes from the Documerica Project and was taken in the Florida Keys.
In the last photo, the baby in the crib is precious. Good way to start the child on the outdoors.
I agree – that’s a great picture!
Love the VWs; a fastback with a rooftop tent and a squareback with a trailer.
I still want a Studebaker Starlight coupe.
Hard to imagine that squareback actually towing a trailer with such a large frontal area. I’d be surprised if that combination could sustain much more than 45 mph.
My Dad had a “Camp-O-Tel” rooftop camper he bought about 1967-1968. His went on the rain gutters of our ’65 Olds F85 Wagon, and was oriented 90 degrees from this one…along the plane of the body of the wagon, with your feet facing the tailgate. It slept 4 persons, but the headroom in the 2 side berths precluded much besides sleeping, so on a rainy day it got claustrophobic. There was a small “gangplank” that clamped onto a pole in the bottom middle of the rear and the ladder attached to the other end. It had 2 10 gallon water tanks between the “feet” on the rain gutter; one side had a cabana with a shower setup and a plastic bag toilet. There was also a kitchen unit that slid off the same pole the gangplank mounted to; it had a 2 burner stove, fold down sides serving as tables and plastic bins to wash dishes. Two benches mounted under the camper were pulled out and set up when eating.
My Dad had a ’59 Beetle and later a ’68 Renault R10, but I don’t think the camper would fit on it, there was a minimum distance between the front and rear rain gutter mounts so you needed a long enought roof to mount it on. It had a crank mechanism that wound it down from the ceiling in our garage (no garage door opener back then) but in our next house the ceiling was too tall to use it, which led to the demise of the camper; we tried to manuver it down the outside stairway to store it in our basement but it was bulky and awkward so we scratched the canvas such that it had to be patched and leaked during storms.
Our family grew such that he replaced it with a pop up trailer camper and I think he gave away the Camp-O-Tel. It was pretty neat setup
Here’s our 1970’s camping setup, with the 1972 Matador and 1968 Sears pop up trailer.
I went on a Mustang road trip with my father last month, we stopped by this campground and had a walk around. Aside from the trees being bigger it hasn’t changed much.
Wonderful collection of images! Car camping trips are great fun, and one of those things that are probably more enjoyable now, with advances in tents and their ease-of-use.
I never camped when I was growing up, so it’s something I developed a interest in as an adult. Below is our first camping trip as a family – about 10 years ago. This particular camping trip was with our family in my brother-in-law’s family, and all of our kids were between 4 and 6 years old. We camped every year together for a while afterwards – less now since the kids are teenagers. But still, lots of great memories.
I loved camping until my injuries made it impossible to sleep on the ground anymore .
I have many fond memories of camping all over New England from the 1950’s into the late 1960’s when I moved Way Out West, I camped a fair bit here too, it’s *very* different but waking up before the sun and pumping up the Coleman stove for that first (and always best) hot cuppa remains one of life’s simpler joys .
I’m lucky that I was able to take my young son all over the U.S.A. camping, one epic Summer trip from coast to coast and back again in a retired IHC 88 passenger school bus that cracked the block the first day out in Needles, Ca., we nursed it to the East and back again towing an MG TD on a two axle trailer, my son is about to turn 45 and still loves to take his brood camping as often as possible so I must have dome something correctly .
He prefers remote unsupported camping, I preferred campgrounds .
I cannot see one of those bat wing MoPars without thinking of “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad World” =8-) .
The VW Fastback isn’t a U.S. model, I love those fastbacks and wish I hadn’t sold the last one I had on .
These are wonderfully evocative images .
I wish I still had the camping pictures I took in the 1970’s & 1908’s .
-Nate
+1 on that cuppa
Treat your self to a Death Valley vacation and you’ll really enjoy the sunup .
Similar deal most anywhere in America but I like the empty Desert best .
-Nate
I spent a couple of decades on a camping trip around Aussie, tried most ideas Towed caravans, tents, panel vans, Kombi van, none are perfect some are just a menace but it would make a nice retirement lifestyle I’m going to look into that.
In the Studebaker shot, I looked at the building’s architecture first, and thought it might be French-Canadian.
Lovely pictures!
The one with the Studebaker and also the one with the blue Ford wagon illustrate a kind of camping-adjacent activity that I suspect has largely vanished from most people’s list of family activities. That is, the picnic via car. In my family, driving to some public picnic area and then busting out the cooler, picnic basket, and (yes) plaid-design thermos was just something that we did on a regular basis. As did obviously many other people as car-accessible parks everywhere had “picnic areas” (and often built in grills and/or hibachis).
I’m guessing that most readers over the age of 25 or so can recall highway rest areas that had no food service (other than maybe a vending machine), but just restrooms and a grove of picnic tables and grills. I’ve noticed that many of those groves have been removed in the past decade…probably because increasingly few people used them.
In fact, many of the smaller rest areas on state highways – often no more than a pull off paved area with some picnic tables (and grills) separated from the main highway by some trees – have been closed by the states. At least here in Massachusetts, those areas got the reputation (perhaps I suspect incorrectly) as being havens for illicit/tawdry activities (not picnicking) and they’ve been dirted over and closed up.
In my family, while we also did the tent camping thing, that was for larger vacation trips. The drive to a state park or highway side picnic area and eat outdoors thing was something we did quite often. These pictures remind me of that.
While I can only speak for a finite area, many roadside parks were closed due to vandalism, drug paraphernalia strewn all over, and used condoms littering the ground.
Other than that, they were great! 🙂
A family vacation through Minnesota in which we camped nine of eleven nights broke any desire I may have ever had for camping again. Mosquitos the size of hummingbirds did play a part in all of that.
The mosquitos the size of hummingbirds experience sounds very familiar. Black flies too.
Of course, all the pictures above are of idyllic camping scenes. Yet we all know the opposite side of camping is often encountered as well. The picture below is one of my favorites from our trips – a camping trip in Georgia where it began storming suddenly and all the kids put on their already-soaking rain ponchos. That was a soggy day.
Yes Eric but those just serve to make the glorious sunny days better…..
I remember a rainy day like that in Montana, even the kybo was flooded .
-Nate
The big finned mopar and the “Studebaker” are my fav’s. The tent above the VW fastback is a curiosity.
That Stude looks the same colour as a ’50 Starlight I saw as a teenager. I must have spent about ten minutes just standing there, and walking from front to rear, looking at the shape – the nose was so outre, and that rear window treatment was amazing.
Years ago, I went camping in the eastern part of Pennsylvania. It rained, and rained, and rained. By Sunday morning, I was soooooo frustrated, I just rolled up the tent with the water and the mud into the back of my SUV and drove home where the the sun was shining bright. Took several days to scrape out all the mud and muck from the back of the SUV.
Crazy me was back at the same campground just two weeks later. Best weather for a Labor Day weekend.
Backstory. This was taken in Alberta Canada off of a stretch of road called Forestry Trunk Road. Forestry Trunk Road is hundreds of kilometers of moderately maintained dirt roads that wind through a steep river valley between Nordegg and Kananaskis. The road is dual purpose, it serves a series of pipeline locations and logging sites as well as a small village, but it also has a lot of offroad trails that spur off of the main road for ATVs and dirtbikes, so camping on this road is not unheard of and there are designated sites. This guy however was in the middle of nowhere by a lake. The nearest entrance or exit to a paved highway or any kind of civilization was at least 3 hours away in either direction, and 90% of the road has no cell phone reception. Despite all that, this absolute legend took a 40+ year old, mint condition Cadillac limo camping out here.
Not as much of a legend as the cigar-munching titan sitting in the back, who’s still waiting to get home.
Anyone know anything about the camper-trailer in the last pic? I have never seen one where one bed folds out forwards, and one sideways like that. It looks most odd.
The VW Fastback roof tent was ahead of its time. I’m developing the opinion that CVT roof tents are overtaking beer as Bend Oregon’s best known export. Personally I prefer a trailer.
I grew up as child in a family of 4 with a pit bull and my father was a vw mechanic and a vw type 3 was our family’s only car and dad commuted a 100 miles a day in it for work and then traveled the family every.