First time tent camping

This weekend, my fiancée and I went up to Lake Holcombe with family as we enjoyed the extended Fourth of July break. My parents are avid campers and have been subtly prodding us to get into camping ourselves by getting us camping gear for the past three Christmases. OK, maybe it wasn’t that subtle.

Their persistence paid off for the first time as we broke the tent out for its maiden voyage last weekend. The tent was a very nice one with ample space to sleep in and it even has an entry way where you can put a card table or use it as a mud room to store your shoes.

As we opened the package the tent resided in, a slogan on the tent read, “Set up in 15 minutes.” Now, of course my competitiveness took over and I was ready to prove to Coleman (the company that made the tent) that 15 minutes was twice the amount of time I needed to set that tent up. We ended up setting it up in about a half hour as my extremely limited handyman skills had failed me. After setting up the tent, we moved all of our clothes, a fan, power cords and air mattress into the structure. After an evening full of fun times around the campfire with family, it was time for the true test. How would we sleep having never slept in a relatively uncontrolled environment before? The answer became clear relatively quickly. Not very well.

During the night, our brand new air mattress that we were using deflated and we had to blow it up multiple times to keep from sleeping on the rock-hard ground. We also had a space heater in the tent that would blow heat until it was 85 degrees in the tent and then turn off until it was 60 degrees. There was no middle ground.

Our inexperience while camping showed as I had situated the air mattress near the wall of the tent and when it started raining at 3:30 a.m. the next morning, I immediately got damp and cold. I ended up getting up once the rain stopped around 4:30 a.m. and hung out around the campfire.

The next night in the tent was better but still uncomfortable. We learned that there are some main things that we will need to purchase in the future to improve our camping experience for as long as we camp with a tent. We realized that spending good money on a high end air mattress or cot-style bed would probably be a good investment as well as a space heater with an accurate thermostat.

There’s so much more that we’ll need to learn and experience before we’ll have this tent camping thing down. The important part of camping is the family time and there was no shortage of that this weekend.

SPEEDING

THROUGH

L

IFE

NEAL H OGDEN EDITOR