My car was full to the ceiling for a two-night solo weekend, and I used maybe a third of it. A look at what overpacking actually costs you, which is not weight, and the one plastic bin that fixed it.
A friend cancelled, I went anyway, and by 9:40 I had retreated to my locked car listening to a deer. What made the first night alone hard, what I had set up badly, and why the morning changed my mind.
No drinking water, no store, no firewood and no cell signal, and every one of those facts was on the reservation page I scrolled past. How I learned to read an amenities list as a spec sheet.
I booked early spring because every site was open, read the sixty-four degree high and ignored the thirty-one degree low. A cold night, a soaked tent corner, and the line of the forecast I read first now.
I closed a nine hundred dollar cart three times and put off camping for two years. My first trip ran on a borrowed tent, a kitchen chair, and about sixty dollars of new stuff, two thirds of which I bought wrong.
I borrowed a tent, never opened the bag before I left, and lost an hour of daylight figuring out which end was the door. What that night taught me about staking, rain flies, and practicing on a lawn.