How We Got Here (Or: Two People Who Had No Business Camping, Camping)

The first time I went camping as an adult, I Googled how to make a fire. On my phone. At the campsite. This is not a proud admission, but it is an honest one, and it's probably the right place to start.

It was May 2014. I was freshly out of a long relationship and coerced my college roommate Angie, who was visiting as emotional support, to join me on this pre-booked trip. We pulled up to a tent cabin in Yosemite, which means we didn't even really have to bring anything. We brought a can of beans anyway. I don't know why. We didn't eat the beans. Or maybe we tried to put it over the fire? Honestly the details are fuzzy, but I do remember a few different families pitching in to get the fire going because I could never get enough signal to load the Google search.

I had gone camping a few times as a kid, local places in the California Bay Area redwoods. My dad was a Boy Scouts leader back in Vietnam and knew how to camp in a jungle; my mom brought a fierce nostalgia for her Girl Scouts camping days and a soft spot for those little single-serving cereal boxes you split open and eat from the bag, which honestly tracks. We had a big family tent, a Coleman stove, and always grilled steaks. I remember liking it. Then we stopped going, maybe around fifth or sixth grade, and I kind of just… forgot camping was a thing you could do.

The Yosemite trip woke something back up. Even in our completely clueless, tent-cabin, fire-Googling state, being out there felt right. I couldn't have told you why at the time. It just did.

A year later I moved to LA and met Grant. He is, in the most important ways, my opposite: I plan, he executes. Where I will spend hours researching things to buy, places to go, what to eat until the wee hours, he’ll do the grocery pick-ups, the gear assembly (and moving), and wake up early to load the trailer the next morning like he's playing advanced Jenga with every single thing in its exact right place. I rarely touch the steering wheel - I fully embrace the life as the passenger princess for the hours and hours of driving we do, past the ends of cell phone range. And he’ll always do it with a smile and kiss, never phased when anything goes wrong. 

We did a Joshua Tree trip with friends in November 2016, and then a few weeks after that we took a campervan trip through New Zealand. Neither of us had ever done a campervan before but it sounded fun and a cool way to explore the country. A week and a half, sleeping in the van, cooking at whatever pull-off or campsite we landed at that night. That trip was one of those before-and-after moments. Living campsite-to-campsite like that, we realized the whole "the journey is the destination" thing is a cliché for a reason. We did a little extra research, went the extra mile for a nice view, took a little longer to prepare food we actually savored. The camping stopped feeling like roughing it and started feeling like a way of life.

We've been chasing that high ever since, seeking that juxtaposition of comfort and wilderness.

The next turning point came courtesy of our elopement. We got married after a sunrise hike to Cathedral rock in Sedona, AZ in 2020. We also rented a Jeep to off-road up to some remote spots for sunset photographs, and loved it so much that we came home and immediately got on the waiting list for one. Jeep had just released a plug-in hybrid, so in April 2021 we took delivery of an orange Jeep we named Poppy. A few months later I found a used micro-trailer on Craigslist that was already kitted out for off-road with a rooftop tent attached and that was that.

Poppy and the trailer changed everything. Before, camping meant waking up early with my laptop open at 7am sharp to compete for reservations the moment they dropped. After, it meant pulling up satellite maps, finding coordinates, and driving until you find somewhere that feels right. Dispersed camping is where we do our best trips now. We have the freedom to choose when and where we go, and the extra distance means we often get a forest, canyon, or desert to ourselves. The miles you earn to get there make the nights feel more worth it.

As of today, we've camped for 129 days on 37 trips across the Mojave, the Sierras, Big Sur, Anza-Borrego, Sequoia, Glacier, Zion, New Zealand, and a lot of unnamed spots that are just coordinates in a notes app. We're not minimalists. We have a fridge that runs on a lithium iron phosphate battery with an accordion solar panel setup that I dutifully move with the sun like a sundial. We have very strong opinions about camp chairs and hard-earned learnings on bugs. 

Our little shih-tzu mix dogs have come with us on all of it. Pema was a constant in the campsite — fluffy, opinionated, surprisingly unfazed by cold desert nights, and always preferred to disappear into all the blankets. She went on 32 of our camping trips until she passed in December of 2025, and her last trip was in Red Rock Canyon for our fifth wedding anniversary. Tula joined us in 2025 and is still getting her bearings. Both of them are, I think, an accurate mascot for what this whole thing is: a little bougie, a little rough, and very much outside.

LuxeDirt is where I document all of it — the places we've been (mostly California, some beyond), the gear we've actually used and actually liked, the meals worth making at altitude, the stuff I wish someone had told me when I was standing in Yosemite with a can of beans and no idea what I was doing.

Up next: the gear that has actually survived years in the back of a Jeep, and the Death Valley trip that started Pema's camping career.

If you're already deep into overlanding and sleeping in the dirt three weekends a month, you'll probably find some good spots here. If you're newer to this and trying to figure out how to make camping feel less like an ordeal and more like the thing you actually wanted it to be, you're very much in the right place.

Welcome to Luxe Dirt. Let's go figure out where to sleep.

Xoxo, Dana (& Grant, Tula, and the memory of Pema)