My dad took our family camping every summer when I was growing up. While researching what gear to bring on our trip I thought about those outings a lot. Planning a nomadic life turned out to be a surprisingly daunting task, and camping with my family was the closest thing I'd experienced to living like we are now. For example, leading a 'normal' life doesn't regularly require serious consideration of simple matters such as, what to do if it rains, if you need to go to the bathroom, or more to the point of this review: where am I going to sit?
Were it not for camping with my family, it is likely I never would have posed this question until there was nowhere to sit. As it was, I didn't give the matter any thought until about a month before we left. After talking it over with Tara, we decided our requirements for a camp chair were (in order of importance): compact size, comfortable to sit in, and (hopefully) very light.
There are times when capitalism can be a beautiful thing—as I began researching what I thought would be the simple answer to where we would place our butts, I realized this was one of them. I started at the tip of the camp seating iceberg by looking what I'd used all my life: those foldable chairs movie directors are supposed to sit in. I found big ones, comically small ones, wooden ones, steel ones, aluminum ones and countless other variations before realizing the solution had to lay elsewhere.
Delving deeper I discovered a dizzying array of options including hundreds of folding chairs, a weird collapsible sling (which was awful), chairs with more moving parts than a car, and, finally getting closer: lots of three legged ones that seemed to fit the bill except they were all rather large.
Once I'd decided that a three legged chair had the most potential, I started looking for one with telescoping legs; I knew they had to exist! It took a lot of hunting, but I managed to find one: the Swedish made Walkstool; it had everything we wanted: small collapsed size, very comfortable seating and thanks to its aluminum construction: light weight!
One of the things I like most about the Walkstool is that you can sit on it when the legs aren't extended—the perfect height for working on the drivetrain of your bicycle, or preparing dinner on the ground. After six months of use and abuse they still look brand new, and work just as well as they day they arrived at our doorstep. I only have one negative thing to report: they need better advertising!
