Before you leave home on your camping trip, take a little time to check to make sure everything works even if you think you do not have the time.

I, unfortunately, did not take this piece of advice to heart when I went camping over Memorial Day weekend. My family had a bad week with 2 family funerals so time was short. By 6 pm Friday night we were so anxious to get on the road we decided to just leave and go relax at the campground.

If we had taken the time to check things out beforehand, we could have left 15 minutes sooner than we did because we found the trailer lights were not working and had to take time to fix them.

Once we got to the campground we found out the electrical system in our popup wasn’t working either so we spent the weekend without lights, running water, and heat.

We were okay because we cooked over the fire (which we had planned to do anyway), switched the camper’s fridge so that it would run on propane, hung lanterns inside the camper for lighting, and used our sleeping bags to keep us warm at night when the temperatures got down into the 30’s. The only thing I dreaded was getting out of the warm sleeping bag in the morning and trudging to the bathroom.

But, the trip would have been more fun if everything on the camper was working the way it was supposed to. Although we couldn’t have done anything about the electrical system if we had checked it just before leaving, we typically pop our camper up the week before a camping trip to check that everything in the camper itself is working and that the supplies we keep inside the camper are fully stocked. But, because of the bad week we had, we skipped doing that check and paid the price for it.

We won’t skip it again.