Campout

This weekend, M. Edium went through another childhood rite of passage: camping in the back yard.

We were going to do actual camping this weekend, our second trip of the summer. The plan was to pack up the car, head out on Friday, drive two hours to our favorite campground in Wisconsin, and rough it for real before packing up all the camping gear again for the winter. But that fell through for a couple of reasons. The first was that weather reports for the weekend were not promising. The second was that we kind of didn't feel like it.

But at the end of our last trip, back in July, we packed the stuff up like we were going to camp again in two weeks, which at the time we had planned to do but also got cancelled at the last minute. So it seemed wise to at least make sure the tent and bedding were properly dried and aired out before they got stowed in the garage for the winter. Hence the portable shelter currently taking up 169 square feet of our back yard (or, in other words, roughly half of it).

I set it up Saturday morning, after satisfying myself that it wasn't going to rain here that day. We grilled our dinner on the Weber and ate outside on the deck, but by the time we cleaned up it was starting to cloud over. A walk around the neighborhood was aborted by the first raindrops falling, and the next thing we knew we were huddling under an umbrella and holding a lantern for the short trip from the back door to the fly of the tent twenty feet away.

We gave it a go, we really did. We sprawled in the tent on our air mattresses and sleeping bags, eating snacks and reading stories while listening to the rain pattering against the nylon overhead and wondering wihch of the neighbors' cats was slinking around right outside. In less than an hour, it started getting cold and even M. Edium was agitating to go inside. Which we did, spending the rest of the rainy night within four solid walls and a ceiling.

So it was a bit of a disappointment, I admit. But it was better than it would have been if we'd been in Wisconsin.

I haven't taken the tent down yet. It's still wet, for one thing. And for another, I'm still holding out hope that the weather will improve and I can convince my wife to let at least us boys camp out there just once, even if it's a school night.

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