Camping and not camping

Last weekend the boys in the family went camping. Here's a picture of them all packed up and ready to leave. They had a great time. They arrived back home happy and pretty dirty - Nicholas went straight from the truck to the bath. All he needs to have a good time is dirt to play in and he looked like he had had plenty of that.

This weekend, the whole family went not camping. We were supposed to go camping, and we packed up everything in preparation. The car was so full that I actually wondered how on earth we could ever do this again. There was not room for one single extra thing.

 
We drove out to Joshua Tree and it was windy. Very, very windy. The kids stayed in the car while Jeff and I attempted to put up the tent. We had to weigh it down with every sleeping bag we had before it would even stay on the ground to be pegged out, and even then the sleeping bags blew away a couple of times. We got it pegged out but we could not get it up. The wind fought us every step of the way. That tent was whipping around like a mad thing. Jeff worked manfully on it, and Adam and I manfully hung on to tent poles in a vain effort to steady it enough. The tent pegs were proving problematic too - they kept bending and having to be reshaped, and then one of the heavy duty ones just snapped. And the tent ripped.

We had a family conference in the car and Adam, who had been out of the car, was all for going home, while Ellie, who had not, was all for staying. So she got treated to the Joshua Tree experience for a few minutes to enable her to gain a better perspective. She had left her jacket at school and so was wearing one that was several sizes too big. The wind just filled it up like a parachute and it was all she could do to stand up straight. She was fine with going home after that.

So our camping trip lasted all of about forty minutes.

On our way out of the campground we saw another tent that had blown over in the wind. That made me feel a lot better about our decision! Actually I was not disappointed at all. I was giddy with relief that we were leaving! That feeling lasted until we reached McDonald's in Yucca Valley, where the kids were treated to chicken nuggets for dinner instead of the beautifully prepared tin-foil camping dinners I had all ready to go in the cooler. Then I was a little disappointed!

But we will go camping again, even if I think we will have to take two cars next time. 

Proof that we were there. If only briefly.