Surprisingly, water and toilets have been two of the easiest things to get used to. Our two-bucket setup for water gives us about 5 gallons of fresh, clean, running water at any given time, and it turns out you can do almost all of your normal day-to-day with 5 gallons at a time. Any time the clean bucket runs low, we just go down to the creek and grab a bucket of dirty water to pour into the filter. Once we have gutters up, we won't even have to do that--we'll just catch the rain in a barrel and feed it through the filter.

A lot of people I know in real life comment on how hard it must be to use an outhouse in the winter, but I don't know, there's something about it that's kind of bracing, weirdly. Using the bathroom just hasn't come up as an issue for either of us.

Now, the thing that really sapped my wife's morale was not being able to wash her hair. Until we figured that out, it was tough, and about five days into a trip, she was clearly "tolerating" more than "enjoying" the outdoors.

For me, it was food variety. It's so easy to go into "camping" mode and think "sausages, eggs, steak" and all those other campfire foods. But when I made caesar salads, or toast, or had brie and butternut squash, that was when my brain clicked over and finally left "camping" behind.