How a Farmer Did It
An Iowa farmer with a small car of popular make started out with his wife and three children to see [[7]]the Colorado mountains. He expected to take a trip of about seven hundred miles out and back. Before they were home again they had covered a distance of more than seventeen hundred miles. By the way, fully fifty per cent of all motor campers are farmers.
This farmer tells us that from start to finish of their motor camping vacation, they did not sleep in a bed, eat off a table, or sit on a chair.
Their equipment consisted of a small tent, the most necessary clothes, a tin cup, a tin plate, and a tin spoon for each person. They had a big butcher knife, one fork, a skillet for cooking meat, a two-quart pail for other cooking and to serve as a coffee-pot; also a gallon pail in which to carry water. A knife and fork per person were also provided.
For covering at night they took along a good supply of blankets. Their food was bread, meat and canned fruit—all bought in the small towns through which the family toured. In addition milk, butter and an occasional chicken were purchased from farmers in the country as they passed through.
Firewood for the cook-fire and straw for bedding in the tent they got for the asking. The cooking was done over an Indian fire on the ground.
Their car was in good condition at the start. They drove moderately and carefully, and their only expense on the car was for gas and oil. Their vacation trip of seventeen hundred miles was taken at but little more cost than the expense of staying at home. Any other kind of an excursion trip for [[8]]these people would have been out of question as they could not have stood the price.
Equipment which was sufficient for the family of an Iowa farmer, comprising himself, his wife, and three children, on a 1,700-mile trip