The Power Outage That Made Me Buy a Real Camping Lantern

We lost power for three days in February, the year the ice storm took down half the lines on our side of the county. I've got two kids, Callie was seven then and Wyatt was four, and when the lights went out around six that first evening I figured it'd be back on by morning. It wasn't. By the second night I'd learned something about our house I hadn't thought about before, which is that we had exactly one working flashlight and a headlamp I kept in the truck for early morning duck blinds, and neither of those was built for a family sitting still in one room for hours at a time.

The headlamp was the worst of it, honestly. This was two full days before we owned a single Etekcity lantern, so all I had was that one beam. It throws a tight beam straight ahead, which is great for walking a trail in the dark but useless for lighting a kitchen table so four hands can play cards or so I can see a pot of soup on the camp stove without pointing my whole head at it. Every time I turned to look at Wyatt, the light went with me, and he'd end up sitting half in the dark asking why I kept blinding him. Callie tried holding the flashlight upright on the table like a makeshift lantern, and it worked for about ten minutes before her arm got tired and it rolled off and died against a chair leg.

Cooking that first night was the part that actually got to me. I was trying to heat soup on our little propane stove on the counter, holding the flashlight in my teeth half the time because I needed both hands free, and I nearly knocked the pot over twice reaching for a spoon I couldn't see clearly. My wife Sara came in from putting Wyatt's coat on him, since the house was getting cold too, and just stood there in the doorway watching me juggle a flashlight and a hot pot and said, we need actual lights, not just the stuff we throw in a bag for the truck.

A headlamp lights where you're looking. A house full of people needs something that lights the whole room instead.

By day two I'd made a run to the hardware store, which was mobbed, and came home with a couple of Etekcity lanterns off the one shelf that still had anything left on it. I hadn't used that brand before, just grabbed what was there, collapsible ones that run on batteries and pop open into a full lantern shape. I set one in the middle of the kitchen table and one in the hallway near the bathroom, and it was such a small change but it fixed almost everything at once. The kids could see each other's faces again. Sara could read a book without holding a flashlight up to the page. I could actually see the stove.

We got the power back that third afternoon, but the Etekcity lanterns didn't go back to some drawer we forgot about. One lives in the camping bin now next to the tent stakes and the cookset, and the other sits in the hall closet with the batteries and the first aid kit, which is exactly where Sara said they should've been the whole time. Callie asked to keep one in her room for a sleepover a few months later, and it worked fine sitting on her nightstand all night, soft enough not to bother anyone trying to sleep but bright enough that nobody was stumbling into furniture on a bathroom run.

They're not perfect. The collapsible design is handy for storage but I've noticed the plastic housing feels a little light in the hand, not something I'd want to drop on concrete repeatedly. And like most battery lanterns, if you leave the switch bumped on in a drawer you'll come back to dead batteries, which happened to me once before a camping trip and cost me a scramble at the gas station for replacements. Small stuff, but worth knowing before you pack them somewhere you won't check for a while. If you want the deeper rundown on how they've held up since, read the full review here.

We've taken them camping twice since, once to a state park with almost no cell signal and once on a quick overnight near the river, and they've held up fine both times, hung from the tent's gear loop or set on the picnic table for dinner. Wyatt still calls them our storm lights, which I think is about right. Etekcity wasn't a brand I knew before that February, but it's the one sitting in my closet now, and that's the part that matters.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you asked me whether you actually need a real lantern instead of just relying on whatever flashlights and headlamps you've already got, I'd tell you it depends on whether you've ever tried to feed a family or find a bathroom in a completely dark house. A headlamp is great on a trail. It's a poor substitute for light that fills a room. Having two lanterns that lit the whole kitchen instead of one beam pointed wherever my head happened to be turned made three miserable nights a lot more livable, and that's why it's stayed in my truck ever since.