The trip log is a green spiral notebook with a coffee ring on the cover and a pen clipped to the spiral. It lives in the Pilot's glove box next to the jump starter, and every receipt from every trip gets written into it, usually by me, at a picnic table, by headlamp. On New Year's Day, after we got home from St. Augustine, I sat at the kitchen table and added up 2025.
Here's our whole year, straight from the notebook.
Eight trips and one we didn't take
- Long Pine Key, MLK weekend, 2 nights in the tent: $179
- Blue Spring, Presidents' Day weekend, 2 nights: $274
- Curry Hammock, spring break, 3 nights: $443
- The Smokies and Savannah loop in June, 11 nights: $2,940
- O'Leno and the Ichetucknee in July, 2 nights: $329
- Labor Day at John Pennekamp, cancelled four days out: $24.45 in fees
- Myakka River in a rented pop-up, Veterans Day, 3 nights: $876
- Thanksgiving in Ocala plus Juniper Springs, 2 camping nights: $301
- Georgia and the Carolina coast over winter break, 6 nights: $2,185
That's $7,551 in trip costs, and every number includes gas, campsites, food, ice and the cat sitter.
Nights, not just dollars
We camped 23 nights in 2025: 20 in a tent and 3 in the rented pop-up at Myakka. Add 7 nights in hotels and rentals and 3 free nights at my parents' house in Ocala, and we were away from home 33 nights.
A few other numbers I pulled out because the kids asked:
- Coldest night: 36 degrees at Jekyll Island, frost on the rain fly.
- Muggiest night: the tent still at 84 degrees at 10 p.m. at O'Leno in July.
- Junior Ranger badges: 15 between Maya and Nico, after Fort Pulaski and the Castillo.
- Cat sitting: $510 to Isabela next door, at $15 a visit. She now refers to Pickles as her best client.
- Shoes Nico lost, at least for a while: one per trip, right on schedule.
Best value of the year was the first trip, Long Pine Key in January, at about $90 a night for all four of us, cold front and dead battery included. The worst value was the $24.45 we paid for a Labor Day trip we never took. I'd make that call again tomorrow. Paying a small fee to stay home from a tropical system is the cheapest insurance in this notebook.
Gear and passes: $1,320
Gear gets its own column because it outlives any one trip. Here's what we bought in 2025, biggest first:
- Clam screen shelter, on sale: $239
- Our green-and-tan dome tent: $219
- Jackery power station, Black Friday: $199
- RTIC 45 cooler: $189
- Two used REI Camp Bed pads: $120
- NOCO jump starter: $99
- America the Beautiful pass: $80
- Small stuff (kids' headlamps, two Frogg Toggs rain suits, a tarp, a footprint, stakes): $78
- Ryobi bridge fan: $40
- Thermacell: $39
- USB clip fan: $18
If I could keep only three, it would be the tent, the pads and the RTIC, in that order. If I had to return one, I honestly can't pick, which either means we bought carefully or I've gotten attached.
The camp math
Trips plus gear comes to $8,871 for the year. Divide that by 23 camping nights and you get about $386 a night, which looks terrible on paper and isn't really fair, because the tent and the cooler will be with us for years.
The number I trust more is trips only, spread over every night we were away: $7,551 over 33 nights is about $229 a night for four people. That includes two weeks in the mountains, a rental house in Charleston and a hotel room on New Year's Eve. I can live with that.
What's not in here, on purpose: the Pilot's $1,640 air conditioning repair in October, the $89 service before the Smokies and the kids' road trip kit. Those are the cost of owning a car and having children, not the cost of camping. That rule stung a little in October, but it's the rule.
The 2026 notebook is already started, a fresh green one from the same three-pack. Page one says Flamingo, MLK weekend, $50 campsite, paid. Page two says Bahia Honda in March, booked last April at 8 a.m. Page three is St. George Island for next Thanksgiving, booked on December 21st. And a few pages in there's a heading in Dana's handwriting that last year's book never had: "CAMPER."
