Recipe for a first camping adventure with a three-year-old
Reading time: 3 minutes
Ingredients: one six-person yurt, two dads, two children, a farm full of animals, and a river beside the campsite
Difficulty: 🟡🟡⚪⚪⚪
Camping drill-down:
- 🟡 Accept that the packing list will fail: milk bottles, nappies, and toothpaste may need to be purchased on the way
- 🟡 Pack for the British night, not just the August afternoon: 31 degrees in the day can still become a very cold 18 degrees after dark
- ⚪ Add animals, canoes, and stand-up paddleboards, and let the children set the pace
- ⚪ Finish with a firepit, a barbecue, and marshmallows
- ⚪ Reward: a tired but happy adult, a happy and energised child, and a weekend that is still being talked about
Perfect song for the recipe
Testing the Camping Idea
I had been thinking about camping with my son for a while. He is three, which feels like the perfect age for an adventure. I wanted to find out whether we could spend a night immersed in nature without turning the whole weekend into a tough logistics exercise.
The plan was a dads-and-older-kids weekend: three dads and our children, heading to a farm in East Hertfordshire. One of the kids unfortunately fell ill with a high temperature the day before, so the expedition became two adults and two children. A smaller group, but still enough people to make a camping trip feel like an event.
We chose glamping because I wanted to prioritise simplicity. The accommodation was a six-person yurt with inflatable beds, which meant we could have the feeling of camping without having to transport and assemble an entire temporary house. We only had Saturday and Sunday, so reducing the complexity of it all seemed sensible.
It turned out that my son did not need much convincing. He still talks about it to this day.
A Farm Full of Distractions
The farm had horses, donkeys, hens, ducks, and pigs roaming around. For a three-year-old, this was essentially a luxury resort, except that the entertainment had feathers, hooves, and a tendency to wander past at exactly the right moment.
He loved the feeling of being surrounded by things that were normally hidden behind fences or confined to picture books. That was probably the biggest success of the trip. We did not need to do much, just being in the moment and explore.
The River Next to the Campsite
August brought a properly hot day, with temperatures reaching around 31 degrees. Luckily, a river ran right next to the campsite, and it became the obvious place to spend the afternoon.
We used the canoes and stand-up paddleboards available there to move around on the water. My son mainly enjoyed the fact that we were doing something unusual in a place that already felt unusual. The river, the trees, the animals, and the yurt all made the weekend feel very far away from London, even though we had not travelled particularly far.
There was no complicated sightseeing plan and no pressure to get anywhere by a certain time. We could simply follow whatever seemed interesting to the children. For a single weekend, that was more than enough.
Fire, Barbecue, and Marshmallows
In the evening we lit a fire, made a barbecue, and sat around the firepit with marshmallows. I guess it is hard to beat that combination when you are three years old. The fire was exciting, the food was delicious, and the marshmallows were just the cherry on top.
For me, the best part was not any one activity. It was watching my son take in the entire scene: the smoke, the fire, and the fact that dinner was happening outside. These are ordinary things in a camping story, but they were quite new to him.
Camping Is a Sport
The first practical lesson was that I had forgotten some of the essentials needed. I left behind the milk bottle for the bedtime drink, nappies, and toothpaste for myself. Luckily, we were not so far removed from civilisation, so we stopped at a shop and bought what was missing.
The second lesson was way more important, though: even in summer, the temperature in the UK can drop a lot at night. During the day it was around 31 degrees. At night it was roughly 18, but it felt like 12. We had arrived equipped with summer bedsheets, which was a genuine beginner mistake.
I will not forget the shock of going from hot weather to trying to sleep in a yurt that suddenly felt like a fridge. The inflatable beds were comfortable enough, but comfort has limits when your bedding is designed for a completely different season.
Another parent I met in the communal toilets put the whole experience perfectly: “Nothing really works, and that’s the charm of this place.”
I really embraced that philosophy. It was exactly what I was looking for: a little inconvenience and a chance to stop expecting everything to work like it does at home. But it is also worth saying that this may not be what everyone wants from a holiday. If you are looking for comfort and predictability, this kind of camping trip may not be for you.
Camping is a sport. You carry things, improvise, get mildly uncomfortable, and feel disproportionately pleased when a basic task succeeds.
What Stayed with Me
This weekend did not fundamentally change my mind about camping. It reinforced something I already suspected: from time to time, we need to get out of London and spend a little time in nature.
A single day away helped us decompress. There was something useful about having nowhere important to be, and no familiar domestic routine to fall back into. We were just there, looking at animals, moving along the river, cooking outside, and trying to stay warm at night.
For my son, it was a proper adventure. It was a very different kind of family escape from our week in Djerba, but both trips reminded me that the best family holidays do not need to be elaborate. Sometimes a yurt on a farm, a river, a firepit, and a slightly incomplete packing list are enough.
I would do it again. Next time, of course, I am bringing warmer bedding, extra nappies, the milk bottle, and my toothpaste.