eastowners

Current Mood: Happy

For the past 5 or 6 years we’ve gone to Paw Paw for their annual Wine Festival.  For those that have been long time readers you may have remembered my post from last year.  This year we went for the full weekened to enjoy the festival with our parents.  We met up with them on Friday Sept. 5th at a campground just North of Kalamazoo.  We’ve gone “camping” with our parents for the past 2 or 3 years…I can’t remember how many exactly, but we’ve never really camped.  We would just go back with them after the festival activities on Saturday night for dinner and a campfire, and bunk in their campers (Clare in my parent’s, and Brad & I in his parent’s) leaving on Sunday morning after breakfast.  This year we opted to try tenting!  We as a family have never been camping, and this was a good way to find out if we could in fact do it on our own. 

Brad’s brother had bought a tent and some gear from a family friend 4+ years ago, and they never used it - leaving it to sit in my in-laws garage.  Being the adventures we are, we opted to try it out as we had remembered it being a large 2 room tent, and that was the kind of tent we had wanted to look into getting.  It is an old tent, it’s been well used and abused, and has served it’s purpose for many people in their camping fun.  We weren’t told we might want to water proof it before using it, which might have been helpful for the 2nd night of camping, but in the end we survived despite the tons of wet laundry to do on returning home. 

That Friday I busied myself with errands to run, packing to do, and prep work for our weekend.  I had everything all piled up by the door so by the time Brad got home all we had to do was load the car, and hit the road after scarfing some pizza.  We had a small plan worked out that we needed to arrive well before dark to put up the tent, as we had never put it up before and had no clue on how to do it.  We arrived at the campground, found our parent’s, and began to set-up.  It was kinda nice because we were right in between our parent’s campers, so it made for easy potty runs with Clare, and food prep was a snap with our mom’s fridges holding our goodies!  We didn’t exactly rough it though, as we had bought a double high areobed at Costco to sleep on, and had our comfy cozy down filled comforter to sleep with.  Clare was like, “Where’s my bed”, and I replied “You’re sleeping bag on the ground”. 

The first night wasn’t so bad, despite the temps dropping down into the 5o’s.  I actually kinda liked it that cold!  We had some dew seap in on the sides, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.  Clare woke up for a 2 am potty, which we ran to my parent’s camper to take care of, and she complained of the cold.  My dad sent over an old heater, and even though it didn’t warm up the tent too much it seemed to satisfy her.  We ate a quick breakfast of bagles & coffee cake, and did some hanging around before packing our lunches to head into Paw Paw.  It was the usual crafty street fair for the mom’s, Clare & I, and the dad’s & Brad hit a car show that was set up accross the street.  My mom, Clare, and I bought some cool Ya Ya hats to wear around, as well as the usual crafty things that one buys.  After our wine tasting adventures we went back to the campground for dinner, a campfire, and wine!  I think the wine helped us in thinking our hats were cool, although I will say it was kinda fun to wear them around town listening to people ask us about them.

Clare actually went to bed early, and we sat around the camfire for a bit before heading off to bed.  All was well until about 2am when it started to rain.  I did a quick look around with the flashlight to make sure all was well, and it was despite a few wet spots.  Clare’s pillow was soaked because she pushed it against the tent wall in her sleep, so I folded an extra blanket to put over the top of it so she wouldn’t have to worry about feeling it.  I went back to sleep for a bit, and then the rain was coming down hard so I woke up only to find a big sag in our tent over Clare.  I quickly wisked it off the top of the tent in hopes of making it better, the sag only filled with water again, and the door we were using for our main entrance was not working the greatest and was pulling and separating and water was coming in around the extension cord we had brought into our tent.  We fixed the poles the best we could, Clare woke up to say “Are we going to die?”  “No” I said, “but we might get a little wet!”  The rain finally let up, and we had a pile of wet dirty clothes & bedding, and a crabby 6 year old on Sunday morning. 

We packed everything up, said our good byes, and headed home.  Despite the few mishaps we had with our little tenting adventure, I would have to say it was a good weekend and left us feeling kinda relaxed.  I think next year we might buy a new tent though, while this one while it was free to us, just has a few too many problems for us to want to deal with.  Especially if we go on our own, and don’t have our parent’s 25 feet away from our tent to help us!