Travel Blogger Learns The True Meaning Of The Two-Person Tent
I should have made a video.
Placed my camera on a rock and just let it record, because it would have been funny. After all, if we can’t make fun of ourselves, we have no right to make fun of others.
I was at a campground to cover the Temecula Balloon & Wine Festival in Southern California. I had dropped my friend off at the entrance because he wanted to see the bands, so I proceeded to the campground to get things settled before I joined him at the event.
Now is a good time to point out that while I have been camping and I enjoy camping, I’m not exactly the rugged outdoors type. I’m certainly no sissy – I don’t have to have a 5-star hotel room with a certain thread-count sheet when I travel or a bottle of beer poured into a glass for me – but I don’t drive a pick-up truck and don’t even own a flannel shirt.
I am also terrible at putting things together, which gets me to my tent. I had borrowed it from a friend and while I had used it here two years prior, I had only vague recollections of how it worked. Then again, how tough could it be, I figured.
I pulled out the tarp, unfolded the sticks, and slid the sticks through the slits. But then I was stumped. The end of the sticks would not go into the ground and when I tried on one side and walked to the other, the whole thing flopped back to the ground.
I tried this over and over and the same thing happened time and time again. Next to me was a similar tent perfectly erected, and I studied it for several minutes trying to figure out how to do to my tent what they had done to theirs, but still could not get the thing off the ground.
After several minutes, I tossed away any macho self esteem and went in search of help. There were a couple dozen campers and motorhomes in the campground but only one group was around, so I walked over asked “does anybody know how to put up a tent?”
In response, I received some cynical laughter – these were obvious camping veterans – but no assistance.
I then sent a photo of the flat tent laying on the ground to my sister. Her husband grew up on a farm in Illinois and I figured anyone who knows farming knows how to pitch a tent. It’s something they are born with, like a baseball player knowing how to hit a curve ball.
A few minutes later I received this response: “find the air holes and blow!”
Very funny! Actually it was very funny but it didn’t help me erect my tent. It was getting dark by this point so I did the only thing I knew to do in circumstances such as this: I popped the hatch of my friend’s SUV, sat down, pulled the cooler next to me and opened a beer.
I could hear the music from the festival and was quite content. Sooner or later, surely some of the other people in the campground would wander back and one of them would help me put up the tent. Even in a worst-case scenario, I would put my sleeping bag on the bottom portion of the tent and pull the rest of the tent over me like a blanket.
About halfway through my second beer, one of the guys from the group that laughed at me earlier suddenly appeared and, in that I-know-how-to-put-things-together way that some people have, said “let’s see what we can do about this tent.”
He grabbed one end and I the other and in 10 seconds – poof – I had an erected tent! All I had to do was drive in the stakes.
Afterward, I stood there motionless for several moments staring at it in amazement. How could something so simple have been so difficult to me earlier? I finally concluded that it’s called a “two-person tent” not because it’s big enough to hold two people, but because it takes two people to put it together.
Satisfied with this self explanation, I sat back down and finished my beer. Then I had another before joining my friend at the festival. He, by the way, did not bring a tent. Instead, he decided he was going to make a bed in the back of his Audi, which he quickly determined was NOT designed for comfortable sleeping.
The rest of the weekend, I heard no more laughing from the neighbors, tho I suspect they had a chuckle or two around the campfire while I was at the festival.
I had a little trouble putting pics on the PubClub.com social media accounts on account that cell service was spotty in this location. This also affected finding my way back the tent when the festival ended each night. I later learned that f you’re going camping, get a GPS tracking device to track real-time location.
RELATED POST:
• Driving To The Temecula Balloon Festival Has The Usual Los Angeles Travel Challenges
#camping
Leave a Reply