Camping season may be just about over for the casual fair-weather enthusiast, but in any case, here’s a fun piece of gear to add to your Christmas wishlist. Have you ever gone paddle boarding or kayaking, and wished you could just sleep out on the water? Or maybe you’ve fantasized about living in a houseboat, but owning one is a bit impractical. The ‘Shoal Tent’ by SmithFly is like a cheaper, more casual version of heavy-duty floating fishing tents, and it’s way easier to set up.

Noting that 70% of the surface of the Earth is covered in water, the Ohio-based outdoor goods retailer offers an inflatable floating raft with a tent topper that lets you sleep out on the water, and requires no poles to set up. You just use a pump to fill the three raft body air chambers and tent frame with air to make the world “your waterbed.”

Since the tent floor is inflated, your air mattress is built right in, and it features a 6” drop to keep you dry, along with heavy-duty waterproof fabric and sturdy #8 zippers. The top and sides attach with velcro, so you can get in and out easily if you need to (no struggling to position the door just right.)

The tent features an 8’x8’ footprint and can sleep people up to 6’3” tall, with the same standing room height in the center. It packs down to a burrito-roll-style bag and comes with a patch kit and manual foot pump. At 50 pounds, it’s not exactly lightweight, but depending on your plans, it’s probably worth it. It’s currently on pre-order sale at a discount for $1274.15, with an MSRP of $1499.

Elevate your camping style with the latest high-performance gear like twig-burning stoves, tree tents, bear-proof coolers and portable loungers. These major upgrades will keep you dry, warm, fed and comfortable no matter how rugged your destination, even when you’re traveling on foot instead of in a DIY RV, fancy pop-up car tent or luxuriously equipped off-road trailer.

Biolite Basecamp Stove

By now, you’ve probably seen the cool BioLite, a compact portable stove that burns twigs and then uses the heat as energy to power your gadgets (if not, you should check it out!) Now, the company is taking things up a notch with the BaseCamp, a portable grill that runs on larger pieces of wood. Smaller pieces of firewood or fallen branches both can be placed in the stove’s opening to cook your food – even in camping locations that don’t allow campfires – and an orange power pack on the side collects the energy. The BaseCamp also features a built-in light.

Scrubba Portable Laundry Wash Bag

Prefer not to tote dirty laundry around on an extended camping trip, or want to freshen up your favorite hoodie halfway through? The Scrubba is a brilliantly simple way to wash textiles. Its interior is lined with little nubs that scrub your garments as you massage the exterior of the bag for a machine-quality wash in three minutes. That’s more effective than using a bucket, and you never even have to get your hands dirty. The bag weighs just 5 ounces and doubles as a dry bag.

Tentsile Tree Tent

Marketing itself as a ‘portable tree house,’ the Tentstile tree tent lets you sleep high above the ground (how high is up to you!) by attaching to three nearby tree trunks. Stack them on top of each other to create temporary treehouse cities with your friends, or hang hammocks underneath them for an extra dry sleeping space. The number of people you can sleep using these systems is only as limited as the tree trunks around you.

Yeti Hopper Cooler

Dubbed ‘the world’s toughest cooler,’ the Yeti has become a household name for its durability and dependability. The hard-sided Yetis keep food and ice colder for longer than any other cooler on the market, and now the company is offering soft-sided versions, too, like the Hopper and the Hopper Flip. Each one is waterproof, including the Hydrolok zipper, and can withstand a bear mauling.

Sea to Summit Tarp Poncho

Heading into rainy territory? Keep your gear – and yourself – dry with the Sea to Summit Ultra-Sil Nano Tarp Poncho. Made of lightweight waterproof fabric, it’s big enough to accommodate your pack while you’re hiking, and then converts from a wearable into an ultralight 2-person shelter.

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Happier Campers Take Your Gear To A New Level With These 15 Innovations

Take your summer lounging to the next level with hammocks that attach to your kayak or the roof of your car, fill up with water like a hot tub or double as a soccer goal. And if you’re stuck at work daydreaming about outdoor adventures, there’s even a stealthy hammock that clamps onto table surfaces so you can hide under your desk and nap.

Hammocraft Floating Hammock

Designed for use by 2-4 people, the modular Hammocraft system lets you lounge while cruising down gentle rivers and and lakes. It can be assembled on top of kayaks, paddle boards, river rafts or on dry land. Can you think of a more comfortable way to cruise through a beautiful natural setting?

Trailnest Roof Rack Hammock

Camp out under the stars virtually anywhere your vehicle can take you with the Trailnest, a simple hammock stand that clamps onto your roof rack in a one-person or two-person setup. It folds up for easy transportation, works with any hammock and gives you uninterrupted views of your surroundings while keeping you well above all the critters that scurry around on the ground at night.

‘Vessel’ Hammock-Shaped Bathtub

Made of strong carbon fiber wrapped around a foam core, which insulates the water to keep it hotter for longer periods of time, the ‘Vessel’ by Splinterworks makes bath time more relaxing than ever. The unique design mounts to the wall with steel brackets and empties into a drain in the floor.

Hydro Hammock Instant Hot Tub

The Hydro Hammock is an instant portable hot tub you can set up almost anywhere, using the accompanying suitcase-like water pump and heater to fill it up from a hose or body of water. It’s made of sealed synthetic high-tensile-strength fabric that can support the weight of two adults and fifty gallons of water.

Dymaxion Sleep Garden Hammock

Installed over a bed of fragrant, relaxing herbs like lavender and rosemary, the Dymaxion Sleep structure is a network of nets inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion World Map – an unfolded icosahedron. Created by Jane Hutton and Adrian Blackwell, the structure provides a large-scale hammock for groups to lounge outdoors.

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Hang Loose 13 Hammock Innovations For Max Relaxation

Do you drive on a parkway and park on a driveway? These unusual painted driveways prove that when it comes to painted pavement, nobody’s really asphalt.

The Milne Boys Home in Gentilly, a neighborhood in New Orleans, LA was built in 1933 to house “orphans and troubled children” – an all too common social phenomenon in the Great Depression. Featuring a cluster of seven antebellum-style buildings, the facility closed in 1986 and was used only sporadically thereafter. Fast-forward to 2005 when Hurricane Katrina caused enough damage to make the campus completely unusable unless one was a squatter or drag-addict – or both.

In 2008, however, things began to change at the old Mllne Boys Home thanks to a multimillion-dollar injection of funding from the state, the city and FEMA. One of the site improvements concerned the campus’s winding driveway, contracted out to AORTA Projects.

“With the help of a crew of approximately 20 volunteers,” explains lead artist Jacqueline Bishop, “I painted the asphalt driveway of the Milne Boys Home with approximately 5,000 simple black bird silhouettes that were individually cut from original drawings and applied with Industrial Zone and Marking paint. Considering there are approximately 460 bird species in Louisiana, we stenciled a variety of these species in an effort to celebrate and raise consciousness about our unique and fragile environment.”

Bishop titled the finished work “Field Guide”. “After experiencing the power of Katrina while sitting in my house, the most immediate, haunting memory after the storm was the deafening silence. There were no birds for ages. It seems appropriate that this project can bring attention to birds who in turn bring life to abandoned areas in post-K New Orleans.”

Tile Of The Century

There’s not much we can tell you about the dazzling, impressionistic tiled driveway above, other than the fact it was photographed on April 1st of 2011… no foolin’! Kudos to Betty Broccoli of Betty’s Fashion Corner page at Tumblr for bringing some much-needed color into the gray monotony that is the pervue of far too many driveways.

Shock & Oz

Alas, there’s no Emerald City at the end of this yellow brick, er, asphalt road though the homeowner must be a wizard of sorts. Located just off Hwy 28 in Bailieboro, north of Port Hope, Ontario, this “brilliant” idea makes a weird sort of sense being there aren’t any visible road signs in the vicinity, so this is one way to attract notice (and alert the pizza delivery guy). On the other hand, the lemon-yellow laneway leads not just TO the highway but oozes over a significant portion of the soft shoulder… Mr Wizard can expect a visit from the Wicked Witch, er, the local county mountie sometime soon.

Treads On Me

You’ll find this patriotic piece of roadwork in Spafford, NY, fronting a home at the intersection of routes 41 and 174. Something tells us the jacked pickup that probably gets parked here sports a Confederate flag on its rear window, because freedom.

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Park Places 10 Paved Painted Personalized Driveways

Due to their sizes and shapes, water tanks and towers lend themselves to artistic embellishment as these dozen creative examples refreshingly illustrate.

A waterpark? In the middle of MY Mojave Desert? It’s more likely than you think… or at least it was, before the Lake Dolores Waterpark (later the Rock-A-Hoola Waterpark and then the Discovery Waterpark) circled the drain for the final time in 2004. The water used to “power” the park(s) came from underground springs fed by the Mojave Aquifer and was stored in an enormous water tower shaped like – and painted to resemble – a Coca-Cola can.

While much of the park has been vandalized and scavenged for metal, the water tank can blame its current tattered & faded state on the Mojave’s blistering desert sun. Kudos to Flickr user Hans Proppe (shadowplay) and Imgur user loganbush for snapping the eerie and evocative images above.

Leggo My Necco

The circa-1927 New England Confectionery Company (NECCO, for short) building in Cambridge, MA is now occupied by offices of Swiss-based pharmaceutical firm Novartis, who graciously repainted the iconic Necco-wafer water tower in 1997. Flickr user Jill Robidoux (jylcat) snapped the tank on January 1st of 2003 and it’s a good thing she did: Novartis de-necco’d the tank in 2004 by painting it over in a boring-by-comparison pharma theme.

Behind The 8-Ball

The giant 8-ball water tower in Tipton, Missouri came and went like a Fast Eddie Felson pool shot in the dark… and then it came back again, this time to stay. According to the Jefferson City News Tribune, in 1968 the water tower was creatively dressed in a billiard-ball theme by its owners, the Fischer Pool Table company. The water tower was ceded to the city and painted all-white after Fischer closed in 1977 but Tiptonians wanted their landmark back so in 1999, the tower was restored to its previous 8-ball livery. Minnesota Fats is likely looking down and smiling.

Cone Job

The only paint on the Grand Central Water Tower in Johannesburg, South Africa, is the aqua blue corporate corporate logo near the top… anything else would be superfluous. The curious conical tower was built in 1997 and stands 40m (131.2 ft) tall, assuming it hasn’t already tipped over.

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Wet Look 12 More Cool Creative Water Tanks Towers