After three years of hard work, my 11 year old daughter Amanda received her junior black belt in Tae Kwon Do yesterday morning. To celebrate, I took her on an overnighter to the Conrad Weiser State Forest, Port Clinton Tract. It's a few miles north of the Hamburg, PA Cabela's. We parked the truck and hiked about a quarter mile into the woods. Our shelter was a USMC field tarp combined with a GI casualty evacuation blanket (space blanket) to block off one side. I want to get a larger tarp so that if we do more trips like this I can pitch it so the sides are walled in.

Campsite at dusk, with Amanda breaking in my new packable REI Flex Lite Chair.



The UCO candle lantern hanging from the paracord provided a pretty decent amount of light once it got dark. It has the optional side reflector and overhead reflector. I lit the candle at about 7:30 last night and it burned until about 2:30 this morning. It had been used a little before but a new one is supposed to burn for ~9 hours.

View from my chair:



The rocks came from our campsite and there was plenty of deadfall laying around for fuel.



To boil water for our Mountain House dinners I originally had my 750 ml Toaks titanium pot hanging over the fire, but that was taking awhile, so I moved it to the coals. This morning I used my Kovea Spider canister stove to boil water for breakfast and coffee. It does that in a flash, plus the pot doesn't get all sooty. I've used the Kovea stove in temps down into the 20s, on several camping trips. It is one of the best outdoor gear purchases I've made.
After breaking camp, we drove about a mile down the road to see the Port Clinton fire tower, which is inside the state forest.



We had a ball and hope to do this again.






 

Great job all around, Dad!

Outstanding  

Lifelong memories are made in outings like this.

Nice job...Wish we could get decent fall weather down here.

Thanks guys. We had a lot of fun together.

Looks like fun.  How do you like the Toaks? I have quite a few sizes and love mine.

I've had the Toaks pot for a little while now and used it several times. I like it a lot. It's amazing how light yet strong it is, being made from Ti. The one feature I wish it had was graduations so I could measure water. On this trip I used a stainless GSI cup to measure water for our meals, then used the Toaks pot to heat it, so I had to clean only one pot.

Since I am to much guy to actually measure water...I didn't even think of that.  That would be really usefull.

When rehydrating MH meals I use a Sea to Summit silicone cup to measure the water.  They're light and collapse so they don't take up much space, they have the measurements inside the cup so theres no guessing.  



 

I think with the Toaks I'll add my own volume markings with a Dremel or electric pencil. They'll be ugly, but BFD.

Have you looked at the Self Reliance Outfiiters cup? (No financial gain) Don't know if this is what your looking for! But it does have graduations!
Your Daughter looked like she was having fun!
The only thing that I could fault you on, Was not enough pictures!!!
So when are you going out again?

PITA45

I had not seen that particular cup. I did have an Olicamp Space Saver cup with me, which does have graduations.
 

ETA, this pic was taken a little earlier and better shows our tarp shelter.