Camping with Dogs: A Portable Playpen for Caravan & RV

Our first trip away with Wally was three nights at a caravan park south of Perth, and I spent most of the first evening holding a lead in one hand and a cup of tea I never drank in the other. A Cavoodle puppy at a campsite is a small brown magnet for other people's chips, other people's dogs, and every unattended thong left outside an annexe. By the second night I had worked out that what I actually needed was not better recall — it was somewhere for him to be that was not attached to my wrist.

We now take a fold-flat pen on every trip, and it has changed how much of the holiday I actually get to enjoy. Here is what works, what I got wrong, and what I pack.

Why a pen beats a tie-out on a campsite

My first attempt was a corkscrew stake and a three-metre lead. It lasted one afternoon. Wally wound himself around the stake until he had about forty centimetres of slack, then sat down and looked at me with genuine betrayal. Twenty minutes later he had done it again in the other direction.

A tie-out also gives you no protection from what comes to your dog. At a caravan park the traffic is constant — kids on scooters, other dogs on long leads, someone's off-lead terrier who "never does this". A staked dog cannot retreat. He can only stand his ground, and a puppy who learns to stand his ground at eight months is a dog with a reactivity problem at two years.

A camping dog playpen fixes both. Wally gets a full square metre he cannot tangle himself in, and he gets an actual boundary between himself and the world. He can lie down, see everything, and not be reached. The difference in how he behaves at a site is not subtle — on the tie-out he barked at passers-by, in the pen he watches them and then goes back to sleep.

The other thing nobody warns you about is the ground itself. Coastal sites west of the range are all bitumen, limestone chip and dry grass full of bindiis. Wally is 7kg with soft pads and he does not enjoy any of it. Putting a groundsheet under the pen gives him one patch of the campsite that does not hurt, and he uses it without being asked.

What I pack, and why each thing is on the list

This list is the product of about eight trips, including one where I forgot the pegs and one where I forgot the shade. Both taught me something.

The pack size is the reason this works for us at all. My car is a small hatchback, and the medium pen folds into a disc that stands upright against the side of the boot taking up about six centimetres of depth. It goes in after everything else and it never displaces a single other thing. A wire panel set would have needed the whole boot floor and would have rattled from Perth to Margaret River.

Setting up in wind, sand and Australian sun

Three things will ruin a soft pen outdoors, and all three are avoidable.

Wind is first. A soft-sided caravan dog pen is a fabric wall roughly 60cm high, which is a sail. On a still evening it needs nothing. On the coast at four in the afternoon when the sea breeze comes through, an unpegged pen with no dog in it will cartwheel across three sites. Mine did exactly that at Yallingup and I had to apologise to a family eating dinner. Now I peg all six base loops before I put anything in it, and on breezy days I run two short bungees from the top rim to the awning legs.

Sand is second, and the fix is peg length rather than more pegs. The 150mm pegs that come in the bag are fine on grass and useless in soft coastal sand — they lever out under any sideways load. Three hundred millimetre aluminium sand pegs with a wide blade hold properly. I keep six in a drawstring bag that lives inside the folded pen so I cannot leave them behind again.

Sun is third and it is the one that actually matters for his safety. Mesh does not stop heat and it barely stops UV. A pen in full sun on a 34-degree day is a warm box, and a dog inside it has nowhere to go. I set up on the shade side of the caravan, then clip shade cloth over the top as well, because shade moves and I do not want to discover at two o'clock that his patch has drifted into the sun.

On heat generally, I stopped guessing. If Wally is panting hard, drooling more than usual, or seems flat and unwilling to get up, he comes inside to the caravan and I ring for advice rather than waiting to see. Heat trouble in a dog moves faster than most of us expect, and I would much rather make an unnecessary phone call.

Caravan park etiquette, learned the hard way

Most pet-friendly parks in WA have written rules and they are stricter than people assume. The three I run into most: dogs must be on your own site, dogs must not be left unattended, and dogs must be under effective control at all times.

A pen helps with the first and third and does nothing for the second. Leaving a dog in a soft pen on an empty site while you drive into town is both against most park rules and genuinely unsafe — he can chew out, someone can unzip it, or the weather can turn. When we go out, Wally comes with us or he stays in the caravan with the air conditioning on.

Barking is what gets people asked to leave. Our routine is a long walk before breakfast, a chew in the pen mid-morning, another walk at dusk. A tired dog in a familiar space with something to gnaw is a quiet dog. I also set his pen on the side of the site facing our own annexe rather than the neighbour's, because a dog facing a stranger's doorway will comment on every trip to the amenities block.

Making the pen feel like his, not like a fence

The step I nearly skipped was practising at home. For a fortnight before our first trip, the pen went up in the lounge room and Wally ate his dinner in it. By the time we got to the campsite, it was not a strange object in a strange place — it was his spot, relocated.

His bed goes in first, then the cooling mat, then water, then a chew. Same order every time, and I think the routine does as much as the objects do. He now walks into it while I am still hammering pegs, which is either trust or impatience for the chew, and I am not going to interrogate it.

Two years in, the pen has been to six caravan parks, two national park campgrounds and a friend's farm near Bridgetown. It has a permanent grass stain on one panel and a bit of frayed piping where he teethed. It still folds flat, still goes up in a minute, and it is the reason I get to drink my tea while it is hot.

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