Wednesday, June 20, 2007

I sure hope this isn't a 'sign'

On Sunday, we set up our brand new tent in the backyard. We figured that since it was still in the original packaging, before we arrived at the campsite we’d better make sure that a) all the pieces are there and b) we have some small idea of what we’re doing when setting it up.

It turns out it’s a heck of a lot bigger than we realized. (Hey, it was on sale at Canadian Tire – that’s how we chose it.) This is not necessarily a bad thing, because if we like camping, we’ll have it forever and there’ll be room for our family to ‘grow’.

So we set it up, but the only thing we didn’t do is tie down the top cover – or whatever the heck the thing is called – because we were too lazy to, and there really wasn’t a lot of space left in the backyard.

Then, the afternoon flew by and before we knew it, it was dark out – and who wants to take down a tent in the dark!

Then Monday flew by and the tent continued to take up space in the backyard.

Then came the flash storm on Tuesday afternoon and we came home to find the tent still standing (that’s a relief) but full of water. Ryan had to use the wet/dry vac to dry it out.

Now I know it’s because we didn’t tie the top thing down, so it just blew back during the storm, but maybe, just maybe this is a small sign that someone’s trying to tell me I shouldn’t be getting myself into this camping thing. I mean, I’ve already been pretty honest in saying that I’m not a camper, and never really enjoyed any of my previous camping experiences.

Although I am still looking forward to the trip – so I’m just going to hope it doesn’t rain, and maybe, just maybe, we should take the damn tent down, because it’s still taking up most of the space in the backyard.

2 comments:

Adam said...

Bah. I would consider it a learning experience. It could have happened while camping. Céline and I have left the fly open a couple of times, thinking it couldn't possibly rain, only to return to a tent full of damp sleeping bags. Just make sure the tent is really dry before packing it away. The only thing worse than a wet tent is one that smells like mildew.

janet said...

Funny, we did the same on Saturday; set up our brand new Canadian Tire tent for a test run! I wonder if we have the same one? Luckily we had Rob here to assist. And knowing that we are major procrastinators, I used Rob again to take it down the next day. Figure it was our best chance of getting it put away if it happened before he left.