Seventeen adults, one baby, three nights, Nepali cooking. This is the part of a big group trip that quietly decides whether the weekend works.
TLDR;
Quantities
Scaling food for eighteen is where people guess badly. What we landed on, for three nights with meat at most meals:
- Rice 10kg, dal 2kg, cooking oil 2L
- Chicken 4kg for the curry, 5kg for the barbecue, mutton 4kg for the last night
- Onions 5kg, potatoes 4kg, tomatoes 3kg, mixed vegetables 4kg
- Eggs five dozen, bread eight large loaves, milk 12L
- Tea 200 bags and 2kg of sugar, which sounds absurd until you watch eighteen people drink Nepali tea for three days
- Drinking water around 100L across the weekend
Two things I would flag. Milk is the one that catches people out — twelve litres will not survive a seven hour drive in August, so buy it near the site rather than at home. And onions always get under-ordered; a kilo does not go anywhere near eighteen people and three curries.
We split the shop between a big London run and a top-up locally on the Saturday, which also covered ice and the barbecue meat.
Cooking rota
With seventeen adults, name three people per meal — one cooks, one preps, one washes — and rotate. Fill it in before you leave.
Without a rota the same two people cook nine meals and quietly resent everyone by Sunday. This is the single highest-value ten minutes of planning you will do.
The safety kit nobody lists
Our packing list ran to eighty items across shelter, cooking, clothing and toiletries, and it was missing all three of these.
A first aid kit. It was not on any tab of our spreadsheet. One per car. Plasters, antiseptic, bandage, blister plasters, antihistamine, painkillers, tweezers for splinters, and burn gel — you have a fire and a barbecue.
A carbon monoxide alarm. If your list has a fire pit, a barbecue and portable gas on it, you need one. People die every summer in the UK from bringing a smouldering barbecue into a tent to keep warm. An alarm is about fifteen pounds and covers the mistake somebody makes at eleven at night when it gets cold.
A bucket of water by the fire pit. With eighteen people around one fire you want a way to put it out quickly.
Two more that are not safety but transformed the evenings: midge repellent and head nets. Early August at the southern end of Windermere is peak midge season and they are worst at dusk, right by the water, which is exactly where you will be sitting.
Camping with a baby under one
This needed its own thinking, and most of it is not obvious.
Sleeping. A travel cot with a firm flat mattress. Not an air bed or a self-inflating mat — a baby sinks into the dip and the surface is too soft. A proper baby sleeping bag rather than a loose duvet or an adult sleeping bag. Pitch the cot in the middle of the tent, away from the walls, because condensation runs down the inner and soaks whatever is against it.
Light. Sunrise in early August is around 5:20am. Without a blackout inner, the baby is up at 5:20 and so is everybody else.
Temperature. A tent swings from eight degrees at four in the morning to thirty by eight. A cheap room thermometer takes the guesswork out.
Midges. Do not put chemical repellent on a baby under one. Use physical barriers — long sleeves and a fine mesh net over the pram and the cot.
Water. Our site had unfenced lake frontage, which with a crawling baby and seventeen adults means "someone is watching" quietly becomes "nobody is watching". We named one adult on baby-watch at any given time and rotated it, and wrote the rota up where people could see it.
Nappies. Roughly seven a day, so forty for a long weekend, plus a lidded bin. Running out means a fifteen minute drive.
Also worth having in every driver's phone before you go — the nearest A&E, which for us was Furness General at Barrow, about thirty minutes away.
The list is not the problem
We had a good spreadsheet. What it did not have was names against about a third of the items.
An item with a quantity and no owner does not get bought. When I finally built the list as a filterable page and added an "unassigned" filter, ten items were sitting there with nobody's name on them — including all the vegetables for the first night's curry.
If you take one thing from this: the useful column is not quantity, it is who.