A Silicon Valley techie/family guy named Roy Scribner been blogging about camping for the past couple years. He’s mainly the tow-behind-the-SUV-camper type because he got a lifetime’s worth of sleeping on the ground during the army paratrooper phase of his life. Now he’s started a blog at its own domain — campingblogger.net — and he has a promotion going to entice folks to stop by: a chance to win a Garmin eTrex Summit® HC GPS. Your chances are pretty good, I’d think.

He has a great suggestion for keeping your ice chest cold: freezing gallon bottles of water, because masses of ice stay frozen longer than individual cubes. He even precools his ice chest with a few frozen bottles (a nice trick if you’ve got freezer space for a half-dozen gallon bottles.)

I know a lot of purists think the only way to camp is with a thin sheet of nylon between themselves and the wilderness, trying to sleep on uneven dirt with creepy-crawlies for all-night company. I’ve done it enough times to understand the evolution of beds. Frankly I’d probably own a tow-behind camper if I had a) someplace to store it; b) a car powerful enough to pull it, and c) enough spare cash to buy it.

Scribner’s main point about family camping is one we’ve touched on here a dozen times: getting the kids out of the house and into discovering nature. And given kids’ innate desire to laugh in the face of the good examples their parents set, the best way to get the kids into backpacking might well be to take ’em out in the ol’ tow-behind, which the kids will inevitably declare uncool and compromised compared to Real Camping.

(Bonus link: Twitter fans will want to add Camping Blogger to their follow list).