From the NY Post:
City dwellers are finding out camping is gross
When Christina Ramos announced she was going camping for the first time this summer, her friends got worried.
“They thought I wasn’t going to make it,” said the 29-year-old New Jersey native, who was planning an outdoors-oriented trip to Michigan for her friend Paola’s 29th birthday.
Michigan, not the Amazon rainforest. Michigan.
As the pandemic presses on, city dwellers are turning to camping as a safe, socially distant alternative to typical travel, with online booking tools Campspot, Tentrr and Hipcamp all reporting upticks in usage. But newbies are quickly discovering there’s a lot more to sleeping outside than s’mores and sing-alongs.
“They’re amazed by the amount of bugs that they see and the variety, and how big they can get,” said Rafael Lopez, who runs the NYC Hiking and Backpacking Group on Facebook.
His group’s membership has been increasing steadily, at about 15 people a day. But the reports from newcomers aren’t always positive: “The lack of bathrooms is what scares people,” said Lopez. “And when you do have a bathroom, it’s the surprise of how dirty they are.”
Oh fuck off. Have any of these people used a bathroom in a New York subway terminal?
Have any of them ever ridden a subway. This year was the first time in 115 years that NYC shut down the subway system to clean it.
Commuting to work twice a day in this is fine:
But a KOA bathroom is too dirty?
One decision she immediately regretted was failing to buy a sleeping pad: “It felt like I woke up and was hit by a bus,” she said.
Since then, she’s done overnights in the Catskills, Virginia and Connecticut. She has even chronicled some of her adventures for the Washington Post. But that doesn’t mean that she’s beyond the occasional mistake. There was the time she brought a portable charger that wasn’t actually charged, and the night she neglected to zip up her tent the whole way. When she woke up, she was soaked with rain.
“My sleeping bag was like a tea bag, dipped in a cup of tea,” Compton said.
Tell me more New Yorker about how well your secession and civil war over ACB replacing RBG is going to go. You’ll all die of hypothermia if you can’t billet in an AirBNB between battles.
These are people who step over filthy vagrants and go to parks where the playgrounds are by weight more homeless peoples’ shit and hypodermic needles than sand. But the American woods are gross.
Remind me how New Yorkers are so tough, I keep forgetting.
I had family who lived in NYC for years, then upstate for a while until they smartly moved out of state. Used to visit them most every year in the 80’s and 90’s. Never liked NYC but upstate was lovely year round despite the occasional walking dbag.
In my personal experience NYC dwellers are, for the most part, bullies. All bark, no bite. There are exceptions, as with everything, but overall my impression was that if you punched them on the nose, they’d piss their pants and start screaming “lawsuit!’ and calling for the police (which they want to defund now). And if it was that way back then, I can just imagine how pathetic it is these days.
I hate all cities. Have for many many years. They were always dangerzones for me and I avoid them like they contain the plague. Well they do.
I went on class trip to NYC and afterwards my classmates were talking about how rude the New Yorker’s were. How they wouldn’t share the sidewalk and how they got “pushed” off the sidewalk so many times.
I hadn’t noticed that behavior. Turns out that having grown up a Navy brat with an officer that instilled a set of attitudes, I took that attitude to NYC with me. As they put it, and my children do to this day, “You own the sidewalk where you are walking. Everybody just gets out your way.”
My youngest daughter talks about watching me walk into the high school as it is dismissing, against the flow of traffic. And she told me that I don’t even slow down and the kids just part around me. She told me that she saw only one person that started to walk through me, looked up, saw me, and moved out of my way.
Most of those NYC people really don’t see anybody but themselves. They have much smaller personal bubbles than normal people. So when a group of people with reasonable personal bubbles are confronted by a NYC person, the NYC person is perfectly comfortable at kissing distance while the out of town person wants a good 2 feet between them, at least.
Speaking as a person who developed the wisdom to leave the Metro NY area, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that NYCers are useless. They have no survival skills whatsoever. Building a fire requires a starter log and a lighter (not matches, lighter). They are incapable of drinking instant coffee, or having it black. It is the city dwellers that keep Mountain House and the rest of the freeze dried camp foods in business, because they have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER on how to prepare backpacking food.
If there ever is a hot war between the city dwellers and the rural folks, it will end as soon as the electricity gets cut off. Maybe a day longer.
NYCers are not tough at all. They think living in NYC is somehow difficult, and it is a mystique they want to perpetuate. But, just watch the chaos when NYC gets a few inches of snow. Forget any real weather event. Tough…. right. So is my stuffed teddy bear.
Bwaaahahahaha! So true. I’ve seen that too. They are so tough in their concrete “jungle”, but put them in the mildest forest camp ground, and they can’t even find a place to sit.
And when the power goes out in their ivory towers, they will fall on each other like rats in a barrel.
While it is quite likely that the vast majority of NYC denizens are as you described, there are exceptions. When my younger son was 18, and he and I were still going on most of the camping trips with the scout troop in which he earned Eagle, we and the troop spent a weekend camping at Sandy Hook. Our Saturday activity involved taking the ferry over to Manhattan, and visiting the Intrepid and the Growler. We were joined for the day by a kid he knew through an on-line gaming community, who had grown up in Brooklyn, who, like my son, was an Eagle scout. Even in NYC, there are people who learned all of their basic camping and survival skills in the boy scouts. Just because most of the NYC population couldn’t survive outside the city, doesn’t mean that all of them are so afflicted.
God, I miss Philmont.
LOL, typical city dwellers. Bragging about how incompetent they are like its a badge of honor. I would rather live in a tent in the woods than in a city. They disgust me beyond words.
That said, in a city of dozens of millions of people, obviously you are going to get SOME who are capable of taking care of themselves.
My theory is that the fundamental split between people in America right now boils down to the age-old “urban vs rural culture”. Each group scorns the other group and finds their attitudes, the values, totally incompatible. The main reason for so much “racism” in the US is that “Black” culture has become so firmly identified with not only urban culture, but the worst parts of urban culture. Rural black communities are actually totally different. I am biased, of course, but I consider that for all the faults each side has, the city people are the worst of the two. They bring most of the crime, the impolite, crude and offensive behavior, and they are exporting it into the rural areas as the suburbs spread. This is what causes so much tension.
The other main group that causes offense are the middle class “cosmopolitan” urban dwellers who sneer at the “rubes and hicks” and basically think themselves far superior, and take it for granted they should be in charge and run everything. While hypocritically spouting off about how democratic and egalitarian they are. The same types who complain about “voter suppression” when people say we should require voter ID, but who seriously tried to propose that non-college educated whites should be disenfranchised after Trump won in 2016. They are all for the poor and uneducated voting, but ONLY if they vote the way their more sophisticated superiors TELL them to vote. Anyone else is “problematic” and ought to be silenced and told to STFU.
Do you want peak NYC glamping?
https://www.reddit.com/r/axesaw/comments/d20lkv/looking_for_the_most_expensive_tent_stake_hammer/
Just have a look at some of the other things that I linked to in the post.
A lot of city folks went up to the Adirondacks as well. Some just for vacations. Many tried hiking mountains. So I stayed away from that. I stuck to kayaking lakes and ponds. Less people. Too many showed up and were not wearing masks in towns despite signs up saying wear one. I met one freaked out by the possibility of seeing animals.