The Great Tent Story

As the 4^th of July nears and our annual family reunion gets closer and closer on our schedules, Doug and I have spent extensive amounts of time discussing camping.  The Shoopman’s have a family reunion every 4^th of July in the mountains.  This will be my first reunion as a married woman and when this realization dawned on me I went into complete panic mode because we have NO camping supplies. None! Zero! PANIC!!

Ok, wait, I breathed for a minute and realized we have camping chairs. That’s a start, right? Oh! For our wedding my aunt and uncle gave us camping dishes (that was a great present)! I also have a flashlight for the frequent power outages our town experiences.  So….3 things? Yup, we have 3 things on the list of the billion things you need to spend 4 days in the great outdoors. Now, back to that panicking thing….

Last weekend while we were in Rock Springs Doug asked his Mom and Dad if they had a tent we could use and bless their hearts they did! So we borrowed a tent. This story is about that tent and my first experience putting a tent up. It goes like this…

Sunday, June 12, 2011

The roar of the crowd at the 6^th game in the series echoed through the living room blaring through the speakers on the TV.  Dallas was up and I was pretty sure the Heat wasn’t going to be coming back so I was getting pretty bored.  I asked Doug how much time was left on the game and he answered with something like: “8 minutes, why?”

“Because I’m BORED. Let’s put up the tent.”

He looked at me like I was maybe crazy for a minute and then I proceeded to explain that we ought to make sure all the parts are there before we are at 8100 feet and stranded with a tent that could be missing a pole.  He agreed at this point and decided it wasn’t a bad idea after all. Well, at first he didn’t think it was a bad idea. That was until I told him we weren’t putting the tent up in the yard; we were putting it up in the living room. Duh.

I have no cognitive reasoning.  I will begin to rearrange an entire room without once measuring the wall I think that couch should fit on and end up putting it all back because my reasoning is that bad. Knowing this, Doug warned me the tent wouldn’t fit but I am pretty sure I am part mule and I chose to completely ignore him and move forward anyway.

Alas, he was right and I was moving chairs and stuffing corners of the tent under the couch but by George I was making this work! I wasn’t going to cave in to logic, you see, because that would have been….well, logical.

So I plowed forward putting the tent up and got the poles for the cross part placed through the loops and popped the tent up.  Then I told Doug I would just hold this part of the tent while he put the rest of the poles in.  He looked at me like I had three heads and said, “Have you ever put a tent up before?”

“No, I told you, I always stayed in someone’s 5^th wheel!”

“Ok, well we need to put all the poles in while the tent is on the floor and pop them all up at once.”

So, we did and it was a great success! Tada! There was a tent in our living room! Woo hoo!

I quickly demanded he put the rain fly on so I could see it as well and I thought he was maybe putting it on backwards. I made the mistake of expressing this particular concern because he quickly said to me, “Listen, 5^th wheel, you just stand over there and let me put this on.”

Finally, we had a tent.  I wanted to sleep in the tent and play camping all night but Doug was not at all as excited as I was about putting my first tent up and told me it was time to roll it up and put it away. Buzz kill.

I am glad we did a practice round. Now no one will see me making an utter fool of myself when we go camping over the 4^th….which I am SUPER excited for. It will be a brand new tent experience!