BUTT END
Alfred, top this up for me. PHOTO: KEVIN CALLAN
your silk-lined sleeping bag and browsing through the latest issue of The New Yorker while organic gingerbread waffles with drunken strawberry and vanilla bean com- pote await you on a bamboo-linen table cloth outside your tent. Who wouldn’t want that on their next canoe trip? It’s been labeled “glamping”—short for
Carry On Glamping I
magine waking up to the smell of a cin- namon-spiced double latte, rolling over in
posh tent and having dark chocolate truffles placed on an eiderdown pillow in the morning was a true act of camping out. So, why did I go out on a limb and promote
wearing cashmere socks and packing minia- ture iPod chargers? It came down to simple mathematics. I want a percentage of glampers to one
glamorous camping. Dating back to the Afri- can safaris, it is now more like Club Med in the boonies. Celebrities such as Kate Moss and Sienna Miller have popularized glamping in the U.K. and the U.S. and it’s now a hot com- modity in Canada, which is why Global News, Breakfast TV, Canada AM and CBC all asked me to help promote it. Is glamping camping? Well, I claimed it was
on national television and boy, did I stir the pot. Avid campers logged onto my blog, Facebook and Twitter accounts filling my e-mail inbox. They blasted me for stating that sleeping in a
62 SPRING 2010
day try real camping, where you portage your own canoe and pluck the blackflies out of your own Chardonnay. I learned long ago that it’s best to grab hold of any type of camp- ing fad and use it to introduce non-campers to sleeping in the wilderness. Let’s be honest, a good majority of glampers
would never give real camping a try if it wasn’t for first trying it in comfort. Let plaid jackets be
THE NEW CAMPING STYLE IS POSH… BUT IT’S GETTING MORE PEOPLE OUTDOORS BY KEVIN CALLAN
replaced by pink Wellington boots—whatever turns them on, as long as they get outdoors. Canadian tourism representatives state that glamping increased outdoor excursions this year by 12 per cent. That’s a lot of new happy campers enjoying the serenity of nature— even if they are having their sleeping bags fluffed while doing so. If a small percentage of glamorously chic
campers, like Reese Witherspoon, actually go out and get dirty someday, and tweet to their thousands of followers about canoe tripping in Boundary Waters, imagine the wilderness areas we can save with an advocacy group that strong and mighty!
KEVIN CALLAN enjoys the odd truffle placed on his Therm- a-Rest.
let plaid jackets be replaced by pink
Wellington boots—whatever turns them on, as long as they get outdoors.
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