The Blog Tour

Here are highlights from the blog tour for the first edition of The Down & Dirty Guide to Camping with Kids.  With a new stop on the tour each day, different blogs featured the book in different ways. Some were reviews, some Q&A, some free giveaways.

Great Wild Outdoors: Monday, April 30^th

Here is my Q&A Helen Olsson, author of The Down & Dirty Guide to Camping with Kids

At what age did you first take your children camping, and how long of a trip was it?
When our oldest of three children was 11 months old, we took him on a backpacking trip on the flanks of Steamboat in Colorado. He was still in diapers and breastfeeding. I loved camping with my babies because they were so portable. We put our son in our Kelty baby backpack carrier (a critical piece of gear) and hiked to our campsite while he napped. It’s when kids can toddle around that things get a little more complicated. I clearly remember thinking how great headlamps are for camping with babies, as I dangled a slippery flashlight between my teeth at midnight, changing his diaper in a nest of sleeping bags.

What are your kids’ favorite campfire snack?
S’mores are so old school! We like to raid our pantry at home, bringing along candied ginger, dried cherries, chocolate chips, chocolate sauce, and coconut, as well as fresh fruit like strawberries and blueberries. For dessert, we open up the s’mores bar. Which is to say, we dig holes in marshmallows and stuff in different combos of goodies… Read the full story.

Road Trips for Families:  Tuesday, May 1^st

Before kids, camping happens on a whim. Want to go camping? Sure. Toss a few things in the car and off you go. After kids, you need a professional organizer. We asked Helen Olsson, author of The Down & Dirty Guide to Camping with Kids to give us her top ten tips for car camping with kids. After a trip or two, you’ll wonder how you ever camped with out them.

By the time our brood had swelled to three, we knew it was time to trade in our cool Chevy Blazer for a minivan. So there I was at the wheel of a vehicle I’d once derisively called a Breeder-mobile. But if you’ve got a swaggerwagon, you know minivans rule. Especially if you’re heading out on the highway for a road trip of the car-camping variety… Read the full story.

Recreating with Kids: Wednesday, May 2^nd

Camping-with-kids-ophobes take heart – there’s a new book out to help make things easier. Travel writer Helen Olsson has just released The Down and Dirty Guide to Camping with Kids: How to Plan Memorable Family Adventures & Connect Kids to Nature (Roost Books, April 2012), sharing the lessons she’s learned over the years with camping with her family. Recreatingwithkids.com catches up with her for her thoughts on the project.

What inspired you to write the book?

My inspiration was twofold. I’ve always loved to camp. My fondest memories are camping with my brothers and sisters as a kid and backpacking with my husband (pre-kids). I’ll never forget the time a family of skunks circumnavigated our campfire, walking literally under our feet. Now that I have kids of my own, I’ve become even more passionate about camping. We just love to get out in the woods, hike, smell the pines, roast marshmallows over a campfire, and fall asleep to the sound of crickets. It’s heaven for us… Read the full story.

Playful Learning:  Thursday, May 3^rd

I’m thrilled to be one of the stops on Helen Olsson’s blog tour for her new book, The Down & Dirty Guide to Camping with Kids. It is full of practical tips on how to plan memorable, outdoor, family adventures. You can also find Helen at her humorous and insightful blog, Mad Dog Mom. She is with us here today with some helpful advice on hiking with children.

Ten Tips for Hiking with Kids by Helen Olsson

Of all the outdoor pursuits, hiking is surely the simplest of all. Just lace up your hiking boots, grab a snack and some water, and off you go.* A morning spent trucking down the trails can be a blissful way to exercise, enjoy the great outdoors, rub elbows with Mother Nature, maybe even meditate on life.

But when you have little chiddlers in tow, a walk in the park can instantly turn into an angst-filled trail of tears. If the planets don’t align, kids will grow weary, become famished in short order, and start to whine like a bad transmission in high gear.  With the following tips and tactics from my new book, The Down & Dirty Guide to Camping with Kids (Roost Books, April 2012), you’ll have much greater success with The Family Hike. And when you do, the hike will once again become the perfect way to enjoy the outdoors.

My favorite strategy for hiking with kids is to add a dose of arts and crafts. It’s part distraction technique, because you never, ever want to tell kids you’re going on a hike. Read the full story…

Real Life Delicious: Friday, May 4

Helen’s awesome blog, Mad Dog Mom, chronicles her adventures in parenthood, which have included taking her three kids backcountry skiing, llama trekking, and on multi-day camping trips before they could walk. Her new book, The Down & Dirty Guide to Camping with Kids (Roost Books, April 2012), is a fun read as well as a super helpful guide to everything you need to know before braving the backwoods with your offspring. Of course, I was especially interested in the chapter on Camp Grub, which is packed with useful tips (even gourmet camp chefs with mack-daddy mess kits will learn something, trust me) and delicious camp-food recipes. Read the full story…