The Wagon That Let Me Keep Camping Solo

I almost gave the site back. That's the part of this story I don't love telling, but it's the true part, so here it is. I'd had a walk-in site reserved at a state park two hours from home for the better part of a year, one of the handful of sites right along the water that don't allow a vehicle anywhere near them. You park in a gravel lot up the hill and carry everything down from there. I'd wanted that particular spot since a ranger mentioned it to me three seasons back, and I finally had it booked for a Tuesday through Thursday in the quiet part of the season. What kept me from handing it back was a folded-up Mac Sports wagon I had thrown in the car at the last minute and very nearly left in the garage.

Then I got there and looked at the path.

It wasn't short. I paced it off later and it came to something over three hundred feet of packed dirt and root, downhill going in, which meant uphill coming back out for every single trip. I stood at the tailgate of my car with a cooler, a folded tent, a sleeping bag, a water jug, a camp chair, and Biscuit doing figure eights around my ankles, and I did the math on how many trips that path was going to take me. Four. Maybe five, if I paced myself the way my knees generally insist on.

I sat in the driver's seat for a minute with the door still open and seriously considered calling it. Not because the site wasn't worth it. Because I wasn't sure I was going to have anything left in me to enjoy it by the time everything was down there. Twenty-eight years driving a school bus taught me to plan a route before I move, and the route I was staring at looked like it was going to cost me the whole first evening just hauling. I got out and went around to the back for the Mac Sports wagon instead.

That's really what this is about for me now, more than my back or my knees specifically. It's about which sites are still mine to pick from. The drive-up loops are always available, trailer pulled right up beside the picnic table, nothing to carry more than a few steps. But the walk-in sites, the ones tucked away from the road because that's exactly what makes them good, those had quietly become sites I looked at in the reservation system and scrolled right past. Not because I didn't want them. Because I'd started assuming I couldn't manage them alone anymore.

I wasn't losing my nerve for camping. I was losing my map. The good sites were still there. I'd just stopped believing I could reach them by myself.

What actually happened that morning is I didn't call it. I remembered the folding wagon still sitting flat in my trunk from a trip to the farmers market, half forgotten, mostly used for hauling tomatoes and a case of water at that point. I unfolded it in the gravel lot, dropped the cooler in first, stood the tent bag up against it, laid the sleeping bag and chair across the top, and looped Biscuit's leash handle around the frame so both my hands were free. One trip. The whole load, one trip, down a path I'd been ready to surrender the reservation over twenty minutes earlier.

It rolled easier than I expected over root and packed dirt, better than I expected it to on the loose gravel section closer to the lot. I had to lift it over one exposed root about halfway down, and I'll be honest, on the way back out with an empty wagon it was the uphill breathing that got me, not the pulling. But I got there with enough left in me to actually pitch the tent, get the chair set up facing the water, and sit down before the light went, instead of arriving spent and irritable with three more trips still ahead of me.

I've used it since on two more walk-in sites and one drive-up loop where the site itself sat a good hundred yards from the parking pad, which happens more than you'd think even at places built for RVs. It folds down flat enough to stand against the trunk wall, so it rides along on every trip now whether I think I'll need it or not. The 150-pound rating is more than I've ever loaded onto it, and the steel frame hasn't so much as squeaked over two seasons of gravel, dirt, and one memorable stretch of sand.

I wrote up the fuller list of what changed once I started bringing it everywhere, and if you want the plain honest rundown including the couple of things I'd have wanted to know before I bought it, that's in my full review, cons and all. I've also got ten specific reasons it earned a permanent spot in the trunk, if you want the short version.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you've caught yourself scrolling past the reservation for a site you actually want, telling yourself it's probably too far to carry gear to alone, I'd tell you to look at the path before you decide that for sure. Most of the time what's stopping you isn't the site. It's the number of trips you think it's going to take to get your things there. A wagon that folds flat enough to live in your trunk turns four or five trips into one, and that's the difference between a reservation you keep and one you quietly let go of. I'm not going to tell you it makes the walk shorter. It doesn't. It just means you arrive with enough of yourself left to sit down and enjoy the reason you booked the site in the first place.