Okay, I’m going to admit that we’ve never thought much of people who camped AND watched TV. For us, camping is about being outside, sitting by a fire, hanging in a hammock and reading books. That is when we’re at camp, because most of our time is out hiking or biking or exploring wherever we are. We never understood campers who went somewhere only to sit inside and watch TV and were especially befuddled by people who watched TVs outside.

We always thought that having a TV in your camper and access to cable hookups was a little too much of bringing home along with you and not fully accepting the camping experience. So when we got the T@B 320S and there was a TV hanging on the wall, we thought “we don’t need that.”

But it is true that we always have our iPads with us because we use them for reading books and for notetaking and ways to view photos, even when we’re off the grid. And we do load them up with downloads of TV shows and movies. But we’re not big TV people generally. We only have one TV at home in the living room and we have never been people who watch TV in bed. We watch a couple of hours of TV in the evening and almost never anything live.

Over the years, we have developed a habit of watching TV in the camper at night. After dinner and sitting by the fire and relaxing, there comes a time when we’re ready to head to bed and cuddle up in the teardrop and often we’d hang one of our iPads from one of the cabinets and watch an episode of something–Better Off Ted or maybe Battlestar Galatica or some other SciFi show. When we were home, we liked to use the camper for “trailer movie nights” where we’d order a pizza and sit in the camper with some pizza and wine to watch a movie on the iPad before falling asleep camping in our driveway.

When we got the T@B home and started sitting in it, we realized that the idea of watching a tiny iPad screen in a bigger space didn’t necessarily make sense and that maybe the TV could be used as a screen for iPad content. We literally didn’t want to have TV, but we did want to replicate all the fun of trailer movie nights and watching the content we had on our iPads.

It took a bit of finagling to figure out that the best way to make that happen. We found that the best way is to get some iPad to HDMI converters and an HDMI cable to plug into the media system. Then whatever you are playing on the iPad displays on the TV and the sound comes through the trailer speakers. And at home, since we have the camper close enough to have access to our house wifi network, we are able to stream anything we want to. It’s actually a pretty nice setup!

And right now while we can’t really go much of anywhere, it is a great way to spend time in our camper while catching up on the YouTube videos from others to learn tips and tricks!