King-size beds, fancy soap, stellar views: How ‘glamping’ went mainstream
It’s just past dawn and my wife and I stop for coffee – well, I’m getting coffee, Melanie’s getting Mountain Dew – at the last gas station for miles, in Torrey, Utah. “Torrey: The Middle of Nowhere,” explains a dusty T-shirt in the sales bin. “And That’s the Way We Like It.”
A friendly man fixing his coffee next to me asks, “Out here camping?”
“Sort of,” I say. “We’re glamping.”
“Glamping,” he repeats.
“Short for ‘glamorous camping,’” I tell him. “All the camping, none of the work. Tents all prepped for you. Beds. French soap. Campfires you don’t have to build.”
He looks at me narrowly for a moment and adds some creamer. “Ah. The army tents.”
“Not army,” I say. “Safari.”
“Riiiight,” he says, and laughs. “Well that sounds pricier.” Then he says, “Looks like it’d be cool, though.”
And then he’s off, tucking himself into a 30-year-old Porsche retooled with matte paint and off-road tires, before I can parry his skepticism with my data – how Google searches for glamping just reached 100 times their total a decade ago, how private equity investors decided that even minority stakes in modest eight-site glamping chains are worth $17 million. How glamping established its hottest hotbed in southern Utah, much of which my wife and I are traversing as we speak. (My wife being Monitor photographer Melanie Stetson Freeman, whose pictures document the trip.)
I would have told him how glamping is a full-on Which is why we’re on the road for this summer travel piece in the first place, putting it to the test: Exactly what is glamping, anyway? Is there a secret to why it’s grown so
