Tips to Get You and Your Family to Put Down the Smartphone While Camping

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Wade Thiel

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Wade divides his time among various outdoor activities in both urban and rural environments. An adventurer by nature, he is always up for a challenging hike, fun hunt, or day out on the water with friends and family. When he isn’t enjoying the outdoors, he’s writing, reading, or tinkering with motorcycles and cars.

Smartphones are a huge part of our lives whether we want to admit it or not. They connect us to our friends and family, they provide us access to things like email, news, games, apps, and all sorts of entertainment and information. I’m not going to suggest smartphones are bad. I think they’re great, but sometimes we spend far too much time on them.

Camping is supposed to be about enjoying the outdoors and you can’t truly do that through the screen of your smartphone. With that in mind, I want to share a few tips that should help you put your phone down more often and enjoy camping even more than you currently do.

Stay Busy

African American Family Cycling Through Fall Woodland

One of the best ways I’ve found to keep myself away from my phone is to have plenty of things to do. When you’re white water rafting, hiking, mountain biking, playing an outdoor game, or conversing with others, you’re more likely to puy the phone down and focus on what you’re doing.

So, the next time you’re on a camping trip make sure to plan plenty of activities for the whole family. This won’t eliminate your smartphone from the equation, but it will help you and the rest of your family or fellow campers to put down their phones for a while and enjoy what they’re doing and where they are.

Leave Your Phone Behind

Smart phone laid on an old office desk, flat lay, copy space

Going for a hike? Leave the phone in your travel trailer or motorhome. It will be there when you return, and you’ll experience a level of freedom you couldn’t have if you were still tethered to the rest of the world through your smartphone. If you’re going on a family hike or doing some other activity as a family, tell others to leave their smartphone behind, too.

If you feel you would like to have a way to communicate in the event of an accident, allow one person in your party to bring along their cell phone. This way, most of the temptation is gone, and you’ll be able to enjoy everything you see and experience to the fullest.

Carry a Digital Camera

Unknown People Taking Photos with Digital Camera at the Temple in Kathmandu Nepal.

So, you don’t want to leave your phone behind because you want to take pictures, eh? Well, I have a solution for you. Carry a good digital camera. A good digital camera will take high-quality photos that many smartphones can’t capture. You’ll also likely have more zoom and features, and you won’t become distracted by all the other features that your phone has.

If you’re worried about storage and the ability to share your photos, many digital cameras come with Wi-Fi and a Bluetooth connection. This allows you to send the pictures you’ve taken directly to your phone or to storage in the cloud that you can then access from your phone and post to social media or share any way you want. The best part is that taking photos this way will keep them from using up valuable storage space on your phone.

Have Periods of the Day Where You Don’t Use Your Phone

Reading messages. Appealing woman lying in trailer near her boyfriend using smartphone reading messages

One of the best ways I’ve found to ensure I limit my time on the phone while camping but still take care of communicating with others, checking emails, etc. is to have set times of the day where you use your phone and then other times of the day where you make a point to put your phone away.

If you like reading the news, checking email, texting friends or making calls, then sit down with your coffee at breakfast and do that. Then put your phone away until the time of day you’ve decided is a good one for you to check back in and see updates and notifications.

The right time of day to put your phone away will vary from person to person, but all of us should be able to carve out a few hours of the day where we don’t have to be available. When you find that time, put the phone away and go out and enjoy the world around you.

Do the same for the rest of your family. They might find it annoying at first, but they’ll learn to enjoy camping more because of it.


Do you have any tips for helping people put their phone away and enjoy camping more? Leave a comment below!

Tips to Get You and Your Family to Put Down the Smartphone While Camping

  • Comment (1)
  • Sam Wu says:

    I think “Carry a Digital Camera” can be a good choose to get meamd my family to Put Down the smartphone while Camping.

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