The Five Best Movies to Take Camping

Whether you call it glamping or high-tech camping, sometimes it's just fun to curl up in the teardrop trailer at night after a long day of hiking to watch a movie or TV show. Most of the time when camping, we'll either download a movie or show to our iPads, or we'll bring a DVD along to watch on a laptop. In this list I tried to cover the gamut: from horror to drama to one of my favorite travel TV shows.

The Cabin in the Woods

Most people wouldn't choose a horror movie that takes place in the woods to take camping in the woods (stay away from The Blair Witch Project and Deliverance). However, this is a different kind of horror movie: smart, well-written and funny. It turns the typical teen horror flick on its head.

How the States Got Their Shapes

If you are traveling across the country in your teardrop, don't leave this informative and funny series by the History Channel behind. Host Brian Unger hits the road to uncover the history hidden in the lines and contours that make up the U.S. map. Everything from geography to Supreme Court cases defining our nation are covered in this fascinating show.

The River Wild

Meryl Streep can pull off any kind of character, but I think she really had fun with this role as a sign language teacher and river guide whose family runs into the wrong kind of men on a whitewater rafting trip.

City Slickers

This classic Billy Crystal movie features everything you want in the great outdoors: wide open country, a cattle drive, deep philosophical conversation and a rugged cowboy who epitomizes the American West.

The Parent Trap

I'm talking about the 1961 movie with Hayley Mills and the beautiful Maureen O'Hara, not the one with Lindsay Lohan. This is one of my favorite Disney movies and it still holds up today. This is a great movie if you are camping with children or anyone who loved summer camp as a child.

Featured Teardrop: Hobbit Hole Trailer

For any The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit fans out there, this beautifully crafted teardrop trailer will have you wishing you could enjoy Elevenses out of the back of its galley. Samm1t documented his build on imgur as he worked on it in the evenings and the weekends over the course of two months.

The teardrop is built on a 4x8 foot Harbor Freight trailer kit and has a 2x2 inch wood frame. The bottom is sealed with roof tar and the walls are built with 1/2 inch plywood. The interior walls for the sleeping cabin and the galley are 1x2 and 2x2 inch framing. The plywood walls are stuccoed with vinyl putty and the floors are hardwood to look like an authentic Hobbit house. The roof is three layers: plywood, fiber-reinforced plastic (FRP) and a last layer of fake grass to give the illusion of being under a hill.

The trailer is wired and has a shore power inlet for 120v which is connected to a surge protector and a charger/converter. The battery is an Optima D31. The trailer has lights and a Fantastic Fan. The interior has small wooden shelves and the quintessential round doors of a classic Hobbit house. Unfortunately, the center door handle idea (as seen in the movies) was not a feasible solution for this teardrop trailer.

The trailer is dedicated to the owner's great grandfather, an electrical engineer who loved to build things.

 

Photos by Samm1t