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| Camping! |
Before I continue, you should be aware that I am by no means a stranger to camping. I grew up camping, my children grew up camping and I'm not afraid of getting a little dirt under my fingernails. I can set up a tent, build a fire, and I can shoo a fly. But these guys were coming at us with the fury and persistence of a small, winged tornado. It's harder to shoo a tornado.
Side note: Flies eat poop. And then they land on your face.
Still, I thought, even if I didn't get a chance to write while I was camping, maybe I could take something write-worthy from the experience. Maybe I could write something about:
- Buying four times the food but only half the water we actually needed
- Meh, we can eat potato salad all week now
- Nobody died
- Purchasing a camp chair and leaving it at the check-out stand
- Realizing the cooler worked just as well
- The aforementioned flurry of flying things
- Making the best of a bad situation
- It's only terrible if you can't use it to your advantage somehow
- The squirrel that screamed at me for five minutes in the morning as I was trying to find a snake-free place to pee
- He/she was probably telling me to stay away from his/her babies, but I feel like there was a deeper level of communication there
- In retrospect, a warning that hornets can sting you through a tent
- The porcupine that waddled into our camp and stared us down with a "tha hell are you doing in hornet/fly heaven?" look on its face
- It only left after it felt we were sufficiently awed by its complete lack of fear
- The bow hunters who clomped through our camp at 5 am
- Whom I was convinced in my abruptly-awoken-in-a-strange-place delirium were gangsters intent on machine-gunning us through the tents in our sleep
- Side note: I've been watching a lot of Breaking Bad lately
- Whom I probably scared the hell out of as I leaped out of my tent and mean-mugged as they walked by
- Side note: According to my children, I have the meanest mean-mug ever
- The floating water bottle lantern my son crafted
- Side note: Water refracts light better than Dr. Pepper
- The way-too-puffy marshmallows that engulfed our s'mores before we could eat them, despite my newly-purchased s'mores cooker
- Side note: :(
- If you move the tent right before bed but forget to re-stake it down, it ends up rolling down the hill with people still inside it
- Getting stung by a hornet through the rented tent as we were folding it up
- Subsequently, spastically chucking the tent into the fire
- Sub-subsequently, purchasing a tent with a big hole in it
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| Fly swarm of doom |
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| Floating water bottle lantern |
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| S'mores gone wrong |
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| Tent stake fail |
Maybe there's something write-worthy there--maybe there isn't, but there are other important things I will take from the trip--like the disdain from daughter's boyfriend when I asked if he had a camp stove we could use to cook breakfast in the morning.
Side note: Dutch oven breakfast is delicious.
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| What I thought I looked like camping |
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| What I really looked like camping |
Blog off.
Labels: book, camping, coffee, column, Cynthia, diary, editing, fail, falling tent, female, firedamp, flies, floating water bottle, hornets, Loveland, porcupine, s'mores, writer, writing
I was attacked by earwigs once while camping. No big deal. I won the battle.
ReplyDeleteAnd you're a better man for it.
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