My family and took in a different experience this past Memorial Day weekend — for the first time, we booked a camping trip through a website called Hipcamp.com.
You see, my boys (ages 3 and 5) are “train heads.” They love any and all things train-related. So, we spend a lot of time identifying and planning train-themed family adventures. In the past, we’ve taken the Amtrak Cascades and Coast Starlight to Seattle and Portland to visit various train museums and associated rail experiences.
For Memorial Day this year, we had our eye on the Molalla Train Park. It’s a miniature train park with small scale functional mechanical models you can actually ride on. The engineer sits on top of the cab of the small scale trains and pulls children and adults on train cars outfitted with seats and benches that ride through nearly 4 miles of narrow gauge track on the property.
But, as with many hobby and niche experiences, it was tucked away on a dead-end rural residential road, in a small community of about 10,000 people, about half an hour outside of Clackamas, Oregon.
As with any small community of that size, lodging options are often limited. A motel. A small B&B. Not ideal for traveling with small children. The local county park campground was mostly booked with 20-30 other campers already. So we turned to Hipcamp.com. Something we had heard about but never tried.
Hipcamp.com is a website and iOS app platform designed around camping experiences. Think of it as the AirBnB, VRBO, or HomeAway of camping reservation options. You put in the dates of your stay, and the area or region you’re looking at, and within seconds, Hipcamp.com generates a variety of choices.
There were a couple of options around the greater Molalla area, but we ended up deciding on the opportunity to camp at Just Bee Farms in Colton, Oregon, just a 5-minute drive from Molalla.
Our experience at Just Bee Farms couldn’t have been more incredible. Upon our arrival, we had to follow our camp host through herds of goats and sheep and watch for any poultry or domestic waterfowl in the road. The 40-or-so-acre farm had four large campsites available on the back 10 acres of their land with nothing but cows in the adjoining 10-acre paddock. The farm had a duck pond, a rope swing, community areas to explore, provided and stocked outhouse, and they provided firewood and farm fresh eggs.
Best of all, our boys could run for acres until they ran into a fence or bothered anyone or anything. So they got to play all weekend exploring the farm and the woods and the campground.
On our first full day at the campsite, we walked down to visit the farm and the animals at the barn. There was a goat milking station, turkeys and hand-raised baby geese. We got to talk with the farmers and hear about all the things they sell at the many local farmers’ markets around them. This particular farm specialized exclusively in heritage breed animals raised organically. It was fascinating to learn about the level of care and thought that went into running their working farm business.
The whole experience got me wondering what it would be like for Lewis County farms to pick up on the Hipcamp opportunity to host campers. In looking at Hipcamp.com, there are a couple of local farms that do it — but I wonder how many people in our region are even familiar with this niche service.
I think about opportunities for farms along the Willapa Hills Trail and Farms in east Lewis County. Each time you put a “head in a bed” in Washington state, a sales tax is charged on that tourist’s stay that directly goes back into tourism programs for our local cities, counties, and state — whether that head is in a hotel room bed or sleeping bag on a local farm.
In some cases, I think some of our local farms are already offering some experiences like this, albeit through means outside of directories like Hipcamp.com. But, in talking with our camp hosts, they seem to be very happy utilizing booking through Hipcamp.
Now, in Molalla, their local and regional tourism programs are less developed than what we are fortunate enough to have here in southwest Washington and Washington State overall (our formal tourism and hotel / motel programs have existed longer at the legislative level). Very few people we talked to in Molalla were even aware you could farm camp near town.
Imagine if our farms here started offering these opportunities. They’d have a whole existing tourism industry here in Lewis County ready to support their new efforts.
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Brittany Voie is a columnist for The Chronicle. She lives south of Chehalis with her husband and two young sons. She welcomes correspondence from the community at voiedevelopment@comcast.net.
