Climbing, Camping and Camper: Life at the Open Air!
Climbing, Camping and Camper: Life at the Open Air!
Now the period of the Christmas offers is starting, and the open air lovers will find many ideas for original Christmas presents. For example, sleeping bags are necessary as well as the winter tents, able to maintain a suitable temperature inside.
The tents and the civil defence are certainly perfect in cases like these; you can get ready, then, to face the cold season and make the garden pools rest: a new open air season is coming, and we need to live it with the suitable equipment!
Nowadays camping is a cheap way to spend your holidays; strange to say, when it was born, at the beginning of 900, being it connected with the possession of a car, needed to reach the place to put the tent, excluded a wide part of the population, who couldn't afford it.
The first who thought to "sleep under the open sky" was T. M. Holding, who in 1877 made a tour of Scotland in canoe resting in a tent; in 1901 he funded the first campers association, the Association of Cycle Campers.
Since then, things changed a lot: nowadays campsites are organized structures, and you are not allowed to camp anywhere you like anymore; moreover, it's not reserved to a few lucky ones who can afford a car, as now almost everyone has one.
Modern campsites are equipped and safe areas, with baths and restaurants, which give the emotions of an open air life, though giving the comfort of a hotel: pools, baths, reserved beach, and the tents of the frequent campers are actually very close to being called "homes": verandas, gas cookers, grills, tables and chairs, but the camping life still remains somewhat spartan.
The same can be said for the camper vans: a holiday in a camper van is a choice which gives the possibility to see places which, staying in a hotel, would remain undiscovered. In this case as well, though, facilities can be many, but in a camper van you are not waited on hand and foot as you would be in a luxury hotel: it's a choice to be made following your preferences and attitudes.
Among the activities for which winter is the perfect time there's the climbing on ice: the snowy and iced heights are obviously more than during the summer, and they become the favourite destinations for the climbing lovers. The climbing techniques on the rock vary depending on the skills, and you can choose between the artificial climbing, in which you can use specific equipment which helps you going up the rocky wall, and the free climbing, in which you are supposed to climb with no equipment at all, apart from the ropes to limit the damages in case you fall.
In the climbing on ice, normally, the use of studded boots and pickaxes, which help you going up on the icy wall, which can be that of a glacier or, for example, of an iced waterfall.