Unit Twenty Camping Economy is one powerful motive for camping, since after the initial outlay upon equipment, or through hiring it, the total expense can be far less than the cost of hotels.
That the equipment of modern camping becomes yearly more sophisticated is an entertaining paradox for the cynic, a brighter promise for the hopeful traveler who has sworn to get away from it all. It also provides – and some student sociologist might care to base his thesis upon the phenomenon – an escape of another kind. The modern traveler is often a man who dislikes the Splendide and the Bellavista, not because he cannot afford or shun their material comforts, but because he is afraid of them. There is no superior “they” in the shape of managements and hotel hierarchies to darken his holiday days.
To such motives, yet another must be added. The contemporary phenomenon of motorcar worship is to be explained not least by the sense of independence and freedom that ownership entails. To this pleasure camping gives an exquisite refinement.
From one’s own front door to home or foreign hills or sands and back again, everything is to hand. Not only are the means of arriving at the holiday paradise entirely within one’s own command and keeping, but the means of escape from holiday hell ( if the beach proves too crowded, the local weather too nasty ) are there, outside – or, as likely, part of – the tent.
Idealists have objected to the practice of camping, as to the packaged tour, that the traveler abroad thereby denies himself the opportunity of getting to know the people of the country visited. Insularity and self-containment, it is argued, go hand in hand. The opinion does not survive experience of a popular Continental camping place. Holiday hotels tend to cater for one nationality of visitors especially, sometimes exclusively. Camping sites, by contrast, are highly cosmopolitan. Granted, a preponderance of Germans is a characteristic that seems common to most Mediterranean sites. but as yet there is no overwhelmingly specialized patronage. Notices forbidding the open-air drying of clothes, or the use of water points for car washing, or those inviting “our camping friends” to a dance or a boat trip are printed not only in French or Italian or Spanish, but also in English, German and Dutch. At meal times the odor of sauerkraut vies with that of garlic. The Frenchman’s breakfast coffee competes with the Englishman’s bacon and eggs.
Whether the remarkable growth of organized camping means the eventual death of the more independent kind is hard to say. Municipalities naturally want to secure the campers’ site fees and other custom. But most probably it will all depend upon campers themselves: how many heath fires they cause. how much litter they leave. in short, whether or not they wholly alienate landowners and those who live in the countryside.