 Tanglers, so a lot of my time as an outdoorsman is spent with my truck and right back here, whether I'm going fishing or hunting, but I do have a really nice camper that I can take at times and I enjoy that so much, but most of the time I'm towing a boat somewhere or maybe I'm taking a trailer with an ATV going somewhere. So I do end up camping a lot with just my truck. And over the years I've built up a system that I really like for truck camping. You know, I've got the cap on here, I've got a rack, I've got this nice pull down system right here that's kind of broken. I've had this on three different trucks, but I can store a lot of stuff in here and I've dialed it in to the essentials and things that just make life a little easier when you're camping in the outdoors out of your truck. And if you guys wanna see my personal truck camping kit that I've put together, comment down below. But in today's video what we're gonna do is we're going to tackle a budget build. We're gonna put together a kit, we're gonna go to Walmart and we're gonna see how much it costs to actually put together all the basic essentials that you need to get started camping in your vehicle. You know, everything's just more expensive these days and your average hotel room is gonna cost you, you know, anywhere from 100 to $200. So my goal is to get everything we need for around $150. Let's see if we can make it happen. We got our goodies, camp chair not included. By the way, that's a luxury item. If you're gonna do a lot of truck camping or vehicle camping, I definitely recommend getting a chair. A lot of campgrounds, they have picnic tables and all sorts of stuff like that. So we're going for the basics, but I was surprised. Walmart, low prices always. And there was some stuff in here I couldn't believe how cheap I got it. At the end of the day, I think we came out pretty good. So let's do some math. So let's start off with our cooking sources. This is arguably the most essential part of truck camping. You're gonna have to be able to eat while you're out there. How are you gonna cook? Well, the most basic way, if you're able and there's no fire pans or anything, that's just to make a fire. I usually camp places where you can harvest it out there or I have a lot of firewood here. So that is something to consider if you need to buy firewood. But I found this Ozark Trail product and I was actually impressed with it. And I went ahead and grabbed it because this is something that I'm gonna use. I'm gonna add this to my little kit. The nice thing about cast iron is it holds a teat really well. You know, it's gonna last really well. The downside is it is heavy, but if you're truck camping, you can afford the extra weight. So I went ahead and bought it. And the price on this, this was almost $23. But I would say this is well worth it. If you look at a lot of grates, they're a lot cheaper quality than this. You know, a lot of the Ozark Trail stuff, it's not the best. But this looked pretty well put together and it's hard to break a cast iron, right? I actually have more than one cooking source. So we can narrow this down even farther and make it a little cheaper. But I thought this was a really good one to have. And next up, we gotta have a fuel source. So we got some propane right here. Now, I was gonna go with butane because I found a butane burner that was 20 bucks, I think, a $20 cooking source. That was just a single burner, tabletop, easily storeable. Actually came in a pretty nice little case from Ozark Trail, but they didn't have any butane. You could always find these right here. So this is like the 308 of fuel sources. You're always gonna be able to pick this up somewhere. The butane, it's a little more iffy if they're gonna have it or not. And they actually, they sold the burners, but they didn't have the butane that fit into the burner. So I ended up not getting it. I'll show you my solution here in just a second. 50 feet of 550 cord, you gotta have some paracord. Whether you're using the grate to cook over a fire or you're using your burner source, you need a way to make a spark, to make a flame. And the easiest way to do that is with a lighter. And I found one for under $2. So the Ozark Utility Lighter, easy peasy. Now this one was pricey, but there is a lot going on in here. This is the GSI outdoor stainless steel one-person cooking eating set. And it's got a mesh bag, which you could use this mesh bag to hold all these things. You could also use it to dry out tenders and other things if you wanted to dry out for making fires. So I thought that was kind of a useful tool, just to have that bag as well. 30 bucks, but stainless steel is not cheap. And you get a lot in here. Maybe one of the most overlooked things is lighting. I mean, most of us, we have a flashlight laying around, some sort of light. This is one of the things I could not believe how cheap it was. This is the Ozark Trail LED headlamp. We're gonna plug this in and test it out. It's a hundred lumens, comes with the batteries. And it was under $4, just $3.98. I also carry a rechargeable LED light just to hang up on things. I have some working light, but basic essentials, you gotta have a headlamp. So that's the only light we got and it was a cheap one. Our last piece of cookware in the kit is going to be a cast iron skillet. Again, cast iron, it's heavy. I like cooking on it though. It holds its heat really well. It's just consistent. I don't know if there's a big difference between the Lodge brand and some of the other brands and this. This does feel a little bit thinner, maybe slightly lighter than a Lodge, but it's $15 for a 10 inch. If you go up to a 12 inch, which is what I usually carry around, so it was a little more expensive. It was over 20 bucks, but this right here, it's gonna fit on our grill really well and it's a nice piece of cookware that we can cook just about anything in. From steaks, eggs, beans, you name it, you can cook just about anything in this right here. Now the biggest thing besides cooking, our bellies are full. The biggest other thing in truck camping is gonna be sleeping. And you can spend a lot to try to get a good night's sleep. Arguably the older you get, the more money you're probably gonna spend to get a better night's sleep. But we're on a budget, so we decided to go with a hammock. Now hammock sleeping is actually my preferred method for right now, when we're in summer and going into early fall when nights are in the 80s right now and then we're getting into the 60s. When it starts getting into the 50s at night, that's when I'll switch over to like a pad or something. And you can still get some pretty cheap pads out there. If you have a truck with a truck bed that has open space and you wanna lay down in it, the pad is really nice. I would just make sure you get a pad that's really thick. Try to find that cheapest pad that's thick so you can roll around. If you've never slept in a hammock, it's actually pretty comfortable and the nice thing about it is you just don't need much else. Your head is already elevated. So I usually just sleep with a sweatshirt behind my head and they're typically pretty cheap. So I was able to get this one for I think around $34, but this is actually two person. This is the only one that they had left. They even had ones that were bigger than this, more complicated that had bug nets and all that. I usually sleep with one that has a bug net, but this one is a two person without a bug net. The one person actually would have been about 10 bucks cheaper so that would have saved us. Now the last thing you need is just some shelter, some protection. Now I have had times where I just, I set up the hammock under a tree and that tree is preventing the moist dew from coming down and it's fine. You don't need anything. But for those situations, you wanna keep your gear covered if there's a drizzle or if it's gonna be dewy in the morning, you gotta get a tarp. And again, we found an Ozark trail. This is the smallest one they had. It's a six foot by eight foot medium duty so this isn't gonna last forever obviously. So this actually came in right under six bucks, $5.97. But I'm gonna show you guys how to set this up and how to set everything up, how I would do everything with the kit that we have built right here. So grand totals right now for bare bones, we're excluding the propane single burner and we've added in actually a case of beer because arguably that can make an uncomfortable situation more comfortable. We are sitting at after tax $159.08. Now that's pretty close to where I wanted to be at 150 bucks. Now if we take off the beer and we take off the price that we could get the single hammock at, so that would've taken off another 10 bucks and we added in the Ozark single burner. Now that would've been $146.08. So that would've been under our $150 value but they didn't have the butane and I will say this, they have another grill there that I would recommend that is pretty much bulletproof. I've had mine for years and it was $60 and it has two burners on it so you can really get to cook it. You make a coffee and your eggs at the same time, you guys have probably seen me use this grill and that is that Coleman, that green classic Coleman two burner propane that came in at 60 bucks and that would put you at $186. It's still under the $200 mark and that is including the grill grate as well. So if you wanted to cook on two different sources and this is mine, this is what I use right here, this is my personal one and these are fantastic. All of this can fit in a nice little tub. Really the only two essential items that I'm excluding because I'm gonna assume if you don't have these you're just not even into the outdoors. It would be a sleeping bag or some sort of blankets and pillow and then a cooler. I think everyone has a cooler laying around but I did find one on Walmart.com that was a pretty good size cooler for $24 which was an incredible deal. We could even fit that in this budget and be set for under 200 bucks. So let me show you how I would set all this up in a nice kit and make a camp and do some cooking. So we've got our kit that we built. Now let's just pretend that we're at a campsite and honestly we kind of are. My backyard is in the woods and it feels like we're camping all the time here at the tree house. The first thing you gotta do is you gotta soak in the fresh air. You're in the greatest place on earth. It's the great outdoors. Celebrate, however you celebrate. Me, I like to crack a gulp one. Step two is going to be setting up your camp. So where are you gonna sleep and where are you gonna cook? Now, obviously I've got my truck, got the tailgate right here. That is gonna be where I'm cooking. I'm not starting a fire anywhere near this backyard or most of the forces in Texas right now are so incredibly dry. An open flame on a windy day, it could be bad. But almost all parks, even when there are open firebands, you can still cook on your propane, on your cooking device. So that's what we're gonna be doing at the tailgate. The other thing we're gonna be doing is setting up where are we gonna sleep? We got a hammock, we gotta have some trees. Obviously, if you don't got trees around, you're gonna be sleeping on a pad. Pad's gonna be your friend. If you can't find two good trees close to your campsite, what you can also do is use your vehicle. And a lot of vehicles have a place where you can tie off. So you can take one of your straps, put it on the top of your vehicle or wherever, attach it, move your vehicle to where it's a good distance away from the good anchor tree that you're trying to get to. And that's a little hack. I've done that a couple of times and you can get it exactly how you want it at the exact height and it actually works out pretty well. So let's go ahead and grab our hammock. Let's set this baby up. So I'm gonna give this brand a two star because their straps aren't even arms length. So adjustability, you don't have much there at all. I mean, you could use some additional rope. If you had it, I usually keep some mule tape with me when I'm camping. This is mule tape right here. That you can make adjustments like that, holds a lot of weight, but this is short. You just don't have them. Luckily my trees, I think are gonna work right here, but you got two options you can hang from. You can go to this knot or this knot or if you wanted to make an additional knot up here, you could, could even go right there on the top of the strap or the mule tape. There's just not much adjustability. My other hammocks I have like way more rope to adjust to and if you had a really big tree, you can even get around with this thing. But when you're hanging up your hammock, you want to go about chest high. You don't want to be touching the ground where the animals are. So it comes, it comes sniff you. Come check you out. Clipping. We're good. Got a nice pretty blue here that matches our camp chairs. This is the double wide. See holds up, yes sir, yes sir. Oh yeah, this one's big. If you guys have never slept on a hammock before, I'm gonna show you. Okay, so when you're sleeping in your hammock, you know, everyone's tendency is to, you just want to get in here and kind of burrito up. And this one is two person. So you could actually get in here and keep the bugs off of you just with this. That's actually not bad. If you're like me, you might get uncomfortable in that position, just sitting there like a hot dog. You can adjust to the side like this. Kind of hang your leg out over here. And that will make you not as closed in like the hot dog buns are just closing in. Cause what tends to happen is it will roll your shoulders, will roll in like this and you'll kind of get uncomfortable. So you can either kick off to the side a little bit offset or you could take a pillow or a sweatshirt or something and put it on your chest up here. And that will free up your shoulders. Cause you're sitting there for hours at a time, you know, things will get kind of cramped up and feel awkward. Now it's time for our 50 foot of paracord, 550 paracord. This is like the duct tape of truck camping. You can do just about anything with this stuff, fix anything. If you're proficient at knots, there's so much you could do with this and keep reusing it. Typically on my ridgelines, I make them about 20 feet long. That way we got some extra room to play with. You know, this right here is maybe 10 feet. That's about a head height, little above head height. And a tie bowline knot, don't know how to tie one. Pretty easy, but I put a little hitch in mine so I can just pull that out. Pull that out very easily. I've never had it come out. If I was gonna like be rock climbing or something or repelling and something very serious, I might go ahead and do the full thing, but I've never had that little hitch come out of my bowline knot. So I'm gonna run this to the other tree. Okay, so on this end, we're gonna do our trucker's hitch. And I'm gonna come about two or three feet away from the tree and tie a little loop there. I could run the rest of this line through and then I could pull on this end and really tighten this thing up. A little trick, I'm gonna zoom in so you guys can see this. So here's the little trucker hack right here. So I'm gonna take my line. You could just go ahead and tie this off, but I'm gonna take it. I'm gonna bring it back through one more time through this loop underneath that first little wrap. And now I can pull this and it's going to stick and not let off nearly as much as it would if I'd just let this go without that extra loop in there. And then from there, we can go ahead and just tie a couple hitches in there. Now what we're gonna do is take our tarp and just make a little canopy above our hammock here. So we'll have shade. If it's really hot during the middle of the day, we want to take a little day nap or we'll have protection from the rain, the elements, whatever. I've ordered a lot of tarps and I've spent hundreds of dollars on tarps. I have some tarps that are individually over $100 and they're not very big. You know, they're a lot tougher than I think than this but honestly these grommets don't look bad for the money. It was our trail, not bad. I'm tying some pressic loops and I'm using tarred bank line. This is something I have in my Amazon store. It's essential. I use it on trot lines. I use it in all sorts of camping stuff. I keep it in the truck. I keep it in all my hunting packs, whatever. It's just, it's so useful and it's a different consistency than paracord. So it pairs very nicely on the paracord for doing these loops. So find you a couple of finger size sticks laying around, stick you to the toggle through your loop that you made and then tighten that puppy up. Okay, so now we have our ridge line set up with our tarp and we can take the rest of our paracord and just stake that down off to the sides. Another way that you could do that tarp instead of running it on a ridge line over your hammock is you could set it on here. You could put it on top of the truck or if you got an SUV, something like that, you could run it as a canopy or as an awning over your truck bed or your tailgate, whatever, so that you can cook out here and you can have basically a back porch, a covered back porch. You can run it that way. There's so many different uses of a tarp. As long as you know how to tie knots, you've got some paracord. There's just a lot of ways you can manipulate those tarps and for six bucks, it's a heck of a deal to get started in truck camping. There we go. So now that we've got our sleep set up, let's move on to cooking. I did not include this in the budget but having a tub like this, so nice, so useful. And I found one about this size at Walmart for around $6, which is really cheap. Guess what, this Coleman fits in here perfectly. Our grill grate fits in here perfectly. And this one is actually pretty cool because it stands up like this but you can also just take these off. So these bend in, these slide out and you've got just a cast iron grate so if you just wanted to set this on some rocks or if you wanted to set this on top of your grill, I haven't tried that yet but you could just use this by itself and it would be pretty useful and you could use it as a table. You could fight off a bear with it, you know? For sure, it's heavy enough. So we got that, we got our cast iron right here and you know, I always got some fish on deck so let's grab some catfish out of the cooler and we'll go ahead and do a cook set up with this. Folder out, she's nice and greasy because she's been used a lot. So we can use our little propane bottle right here and this will last us quite a few trips. You can probably get three or four trips out of one of these bottles just depending on how much you're cooking but I like to just keep a big tank in the back of my truck. It's easy, I've got it strapped in with a bungee cord. If you're thinking about you're gonna do this a lot I would go ahead and just use one of your tanks at home or get one of these big 20 pounds and this will last you like a whole season of truck camping. You don't have to refill this thing very much using this little Coleman. And we're going, baby. Wah bam. This is the first time I've used this cast iron. They say it comes seasoned but it ain't really seasoned. You need to put something greasy in there. Do this beforehand before you really go out for the first time. Let's break out our little cook kit right here. They come all attached. Isn't that cool? Good spoon on that bad boy. That's a decent spoon. This is all good quality stuff. And of course our cup, which I actually use this cup, this GSI. It's got a little handle on it and that's nice. You can boil your teas, get your coffees going. You could make some ramen noodles, soups, beans, something like that in there. Our skillet, I can tell you, this thing is not as thick as a lodge. It's heating up a lot faster than a lodge would. So more inconsistent heat, but for the price, it's still going to be pretty good. Blue cat filets right here. I did bring in some spices from my personal kit, some SPG, that's about all I use on my truck camping. You're going to get one spice, salt, pepper, garlic right there. Whew, that's hot. Just throw some butter in this bad boy. Stephanie already cleaned this for me, so it should be safe. Let's hope. Ooh, yeah, that's hot boy. Turn that down a hair. Usually when I'm cooking with cast iron in and stainless as well, I'll try to get that pretty hot. Let the pores open up, then I'll put in my butter or oil, let that get in there and then I'll turn it down a little bit. That's a little more than brown. We're going camp style, we'll just press that in. Give our butter one last little drip. And then we'll season on top, there we go. We don't have any tongs, we don't have any other utensils in our kit, but we can definitely use this fork, spoon, maybe a sliding, that's good. I would recommend getting either some paper towels or I carry some little cheapo towels that you can use to wipe things up, grab a hot skillet, clean things out. It wasn't included in our budget, but that's very cheap. It's looking good. All right, we're two and a half minutes in on our cooking, on the catfish. Five minutes each side, we should be good to go. Got our shelter, we got our bed set up. Good living in the great outdoors. Like our fish is done, now what you want to do if you've got a tank like this is always shut your propane off while the flames on and let the propane that's in the hose burn out. Just gonna go ahead and take this off, set it on our grate. There a little plate, a little bit of sticking there at the end, but I think we're all right. Now, I know I've been using the camp chair, but if you don't have a camp chair, you just hang right here in the hammock. It's a comfy little seat. Nothing else, just the catfish cooked on our cast iron on the tailgate, let's see how we did. It's a little crispy around the edges, but flavor's there. Oh yeah, I cooked that one up good. Five minutes each side, flaking apart with the fork. It's always a good sign. I'll live for this right here, y'all. Catfish was fantastic. Pretty impressed with the little cast iron here. I was thinking that the smaller one, the 10 inch would be more difficult to cook fish in, but the flays I had, perfect size, did great. Now it's time to clean up camp a little bit. I wanna stay organized when we're truck camping because we don't have much room. So I'm just gonna put everything that we don't need back into our kit. Loving how this is working out size wise with the grate and the grill. Usually I'll keep like a water container with me. I'll go ahead and fill up water before I go so I don't like keeping water bottles around. So if you just wanna drink out of this with your water, have your jug, that's great. It's a little extra expense. Don't have to have it, but this cup would come in useful and you can put your brown water in there. Post-dinner, have a little post-dinner brown water. There's one last thing that we haven't tested out and now that's starting to get darker. We'll test it and this is our Ozark Trill LED headlamp that was extremely cheap. And Ben, I don't think you have a headlamp. So this is probably gonna be your little headlamp, dude. It's gonna be your headlamp at camp here next week. He just turned two years old today and he has learned to ride his little strider bike so he is so pumped. Just riding under daddy's tripod. I'd say that's a pretty dagum, good purchase. An essential purchase that you have to have. I would definitely upgrade my light in my kit. In fact, I have a couple of lights for backups but just to get you going, can't beat that. In fact, that's probably worth getting a few of these to throw them in, some packs in the truck so that you always have a headlamp when you need it. I came to join the fun. Whoa! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Everybody loves a good hammock, a little hammock session. He is all about it. Ben, it's like a wild animal right now. Your ability test, it's good. What's the shelter doing? I'd say we're doing pretty good. It is. You can sleep right under here. This is amazing. It's probably been like 70 days without rain. That's all it took was for me to set up a tarp in the backyard to get some rain. It was like perfect timing. It just came a certified, but our shelter held up. You know, our hammock is relatively dry and I think we would have been fine if that storm came through while we were sleeping. We've been all right, especially with a couple of cold pops, but I'm actually impressed with the kit that we built for the price and I would personally take this out and use it. In fact, I am. Everything fits in this tub right here. Makes it nice and neat. So hopefully this helps some of you that are thinking about getting into truck camping. It is a really cheap way to go about your outdoor experience, whether you're hunting or fishing. I do it all the time. We got tons of great state parks here in the state of Texas and all over the country. So if you've never done it before, it's gonna save you a lot of money and you get to just throw yourself into the great outdoors, soak it all in while you can. So all of that for a price of a hotel room and you can use this stuff for years to come. So if you liked today's video, make sure to smash that like button. And if you wanna see an additional video where I take a small kit, build a little survival kit, there were some things in Walmart that caught my eye that they got some pretty decent stuff and some other things I just wanna test out, some of their gear. Let me know in the comments down below and I will go and take that to the woods and see what we can do with it. So let me know guys, thanks for tuning in today. I will see you on another great outdoor adventure right here on the Lakeport God Channel. See you soon.