Great Gear to Lure Kids to the Great Outdoors

Fozzils has come up with a neat answer: flat, folding plastic containers that are not awful to use or look at. You don't cook with the dishes; you simply pull 'em out, snap 'em together and you are having a stylish meal in the bush without thinking like you are refugee eating out of a can. Love that.

Epic Kayaks, V10 Sports Elite Surf Ski Kayak, $4,395

Know all those dopey, neo-Nanook-of-the-North sea kayaks you see people paddling around in? Take those, maximize them for length, internal volume and through-the-water speed. Then head out into the world's largest deep-sea mid-ocean swells.

Voila, you are now ocean surfskiing.

This latest riff of kayaking lets paddlers use these optimized craft to catch the front of fast-moving ocean waves. Good surfskiiers can travel down the face of a swell and up onto the back of the next wave, essentially connecting long wave train trips that can last for hours.

Epic makes some of the world's best surfskis for my money. They have excellent construction and a no-holds-barred approach to design. No wonder -- the company was started by Greg Barton and Oscar Chalupsky, who have 13 Olympic and world kayaking championships between them.

Bring one of these on your next trip to the beach and you will have a serious day to remember.

Large BigFoot Cargo Bag, $99

Finally a luggage maker who understands.

No civilized person heads into the outdoors scrimping grams to extend one's effective hiking range by 0.72 miles. Civilized people travel with tons of junk, which they usually move all of 20 feet from the back of the car to a camp site or a remote cabin. From there, we then lighten up, do our outdoor thing and have all the stuff we need at hand for some real fun.

So, what's required is a big 'ole sack we can throw all our stuff into, zip it up and lug it in one piece to the truck, car or whatever.

Enter the BigFoot Cargo Bag.

This rubberized tarp can wrangle about 9 feet by 8 feet of camping stuff into one luggable rubberized enclosure: Makes a neat ground cloth or tarp, too. What a tremendous innovation.