This past weekend Selena and I went camping and white water rafting with our good friends Catherine and Tom. Here are a few outdoorsy lessons learned from the experience:
- A hatchet is useful, it can chop the firewood down to kindling.
- A flint is not useful at all.
- When a flint fails, try matches, then a lighter, then lighter fluid.
- Raccoons are scary when they sneak up on you.
- A hole in the ground goes beyond rustic.
- Setting up the tent in the rain makes everything wet.
- Setting up a tent is easier when it looks like this:
But gets a lot more complex when it looks like this:
Yes, that is the tent, or as we were calling it, the Manor House. The three room tent could have comfortably sleep eight (it did only sleep two). It includes two rooms, plus a screened in porch, all of which you can stand upright in. Assembling this wasn’t so bad, except that it was pouring out. Disassembling was a lot harder, and we still haven’t figured out how to put it away.
Still, I will say, I got turned around on this one, once we were there, and it was set up, I really enjoyed having the very very spacious tent. So, good picking Selena. Now, anyone good at folding things until they are very small want to come over for dinner?
I love the Manor House! And I would love to hear the story of a sneaky raccoon….
The raccoon came around the first night, he found our garbage which was only a few feet from us (and admittedly not sealed well), so when we flipped the flashlight to see what that noise was BAM, racoon within leaping distance. Freaked everyone out.
BTW, we did (by some miracle) get the tent back into the original packaging and put away. I really did not expect that to happen and was ready to buy an oversize duffle bag to pack it into instead, but it rolled up properly the first try. I take no credit for my rolling skill, and give all credit to the designers of this Mansion tent, that’s pretty impressive.