Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #347264 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 204 pages

Review
Campgrounds are rated on overall beauty, privacy, quiet, security, peacefulness. Detailed write-ups include area highlights and personal anecdotes. -- Marek Warszawski, The Fresno Bee, December 6, 2004

From the Back Cover
If you subscribe to the opinion that televisions, Japanese lanterns, and electric guitars are not essential camping equipment, The Best in Tent Camping should be your constant companion. Newly revised and completely updated, The Best in Tent Camping: Northern California is a guidebook for tent campers who like quiet, scenic, and serene campsites. It's the perfect resource if you blanch at the thought of pitching a tent on a concrete slab, trying to sleep through the blare of another camper's boombox, or waking to find your tent surrounded by a convoy of RVs. The Best in Tent Camping: Northern California will guide you to the quietest, most beautiful, most secure, and best managed campgrounds in Northern California. Painstakingly selected from more than 1,000 campgrounds from the coast to the mountains, each campsite is rated for beauty, noise, privacy, security, spaciousness and cleanliness. In addition, each campground profile provides essential details on facilities, reservations, fees, and restrictions, as well as an accurate, easy-to-read map, making the campground a snap to locate. (6 x 9, 192 pages, maps)

About the Author
Bill Mai spent his childhood summers camping with his family. A resident of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he lived in California for many years where he wrote screenplays.

Customer Reviews

A good way to find good out-of-the-way campsites
There are many, many campgrounds in California, and we spent several years selecting the targets of our camping trips based on friends' recommendations, or CA State or National Parks descriptions. Unfortunately, our criteria were not often what people were recommending a campsite for, and there are so many parks in CA that a comparative selection based on raw data is overwhelming. What we wanted was:
1. beauty
2. quiet and serenity
3. less popular sites (to stay away from the crowds)
4. car-camping or near car-camping (we have a toddler).

Bill Mai's guide enabled up to make some quick selections based on his descriptions and ratings. His campsites are a highly rated selection already (his criteria are pretty close to ours), the information is fairly good, he gives good input on the best season to go, and his descriptions are very accurate. We ended up going to several campsites he recommended last year and never were disappointed. This year we have plans for several others based on his input.
It is simply an easy way to choose good places to go without having to worry that the site will be less than what our expectations are for it.

Carefully researched & well-organized guide for car campers.
This is the perfect guide for campers who are trying to escape California's crowded, car-choked campgrounds. Arranged by region (the Coast, Sierras, & Cascade Range),this guide rates and reviews 50 prime campgrounds. Two to three page profiles describe the campgrounds features and include information on nearby attractions and activities such as hiking, fishing, boating, swimming, picnicking, and bicycling. An easy-to-read sidebar lists contact information, facilities, open dates, parking, fees, and regulations. Written in a friendly, upbeat style, this is an enjoyable and informative read . However if you have the first edition, skip this one. The second edition updates the information but covers the same campgrounds.

This book is very accurate and has become our camping bible.
We have used this book to take us to areas we have not previously discovered and are very grateful to have it as our guide as it has really made our summer exciting by discovering more of California's wilderness areas. The descriptions of the sites were accurate for the most part and we liked the humorous sidenotes the author included. I even saw a friend at one of the remote camps, turned out she had the book too!