Ideas for Coolers, Cups And Camping

For years now, I have used baggies with elastics over the spigot on my water coolers. I store them in the garage with water in them in case we ever have to go without water. Due to that, sometimes I have moved them and the button gets pushed and the water leaks out. 

Other times, when we go camping, sand gets wedged into the spigot button and will cause a small leak as the button may be slow to pop back out. 

Sometimes, it is years before I use a specific water jug as I have about five as they are a good way to store water.  The dust in the garage gets into the spigot and I have to wash it carefully before use. I just got tired of having to worry about them spilling, leaking or being dirty. 


Those situations caused me to think of putting the baggie over spigot. When I took my cooler camping this weekend,  my brother saw me take the baggie off and asked what it was and how I thought of doing that. I never thought it was a big deal and figured others probably did the same thing. He told me it was a good idea so I thought I would share it. I also store the bag and elastic right on the side of the cooler where the cup dispenser would go. That way, it is there when I am packing up to go home and is on the spigot until the next time we use that cooler.

With that in mind, I know that necessity is the mother of invention.My family had a campout this past weekend at my sisters house. We normally go camping with lots of sand over Easter but some scheduling conflicts with family members caused us to change it to another week.

While we were at my sisters, we had a table lined up with water and drink coolers. We used a Sharpie to put names on the cups. The cups started blowing off the table in the wind. I picked up several before I went looking for some duct /duck tape. I then turned the tape upside down and stuck the edges to the table leaving most of the sticky side up on the table. 

I stuck the cups to the duct tape and as you can see by the top picture, everyone actually used the tape and this picture was later the next day and everyone had a cup stuck to the tape. 

I then thought about it further and realized that in my trailer, we sometimes knock the cups off the top of the cooler or the counter. I am now going to keep tape on the counter top if we have lots of people in the trailer or just some on the top of the cooler if there are a few of us as it will keep the cups from spilling off which has happened many times over the years as people have left a little bit of water in their cups on top of the cooler.

Also, in the bathroom of the trailer, we don't use the trailer water to drink or brush our teeth so by putting some duct tape on the mirror or in the shower, we can keep our cups in order in the bathroom of the trailer as well.


Thinking on it further, I figured if you used Duck tape on the fence in the dugout, you could tape up cups at softball, soccer, baseball and other sporting events and games which keeps them off the dirty ground and from blowing in the wind and also saves you from having kids get cup after cup after cup during the game. 


Thinking further, I realized I could use some tape on brick walls at picnic areas at parks as well so I put some tape on my brick area around my wood stove and stuck some cups up just to see how well it would work and it worked just fine. I LOVE the idea as we always go through lots of cups for our Memorial day picnic and camping is always crazy. 


I also came up with a way to stick the cups upside down to keep the sand out. I just lined up two lines of duct tape close enough that a cup flipped upside down would hit both strips of tape. It wasn't dusty or sandy at my sisters, just windy so the cups face up worked well. However, camping, we get micro burst of wind that pick up the sand and the cups would get dirty so the two strips of tape would be a way to keep all the cups lined up and clean. 


If you don't want to stick them face down on a table, you could also put strips on the outside of the bigger windows of the trailer and stick the cups to the windows and have the cooler on a table near the windows. 

The possibilities are endless using the duct tape to keep your cups in order. I always have duct tape in my trailer anyway but I will for sure be using it for this purpose. Now that my kids are older, I probably won't need to use tape on the side brick of the house for playing children but when they were younger and we had large groups of kids in the yard, I think it would have been very handy to use tape on the tables out there or just on the house to keep their cups from blowing all over the yard. 

I wish I had thought of this solution years ago. I hope these tricks help you in your picnic, camping, or event planning in the future.