It served us well

We bought our tent when we had our first kid, knowing that we would need a tent big enough for family camping. It was the first tent I'd ever camped in that actually stayed dry in the rain, and it saw us through 18 years of family camping and many, many good times. We never gave it a name, so I can't get too soppy about it - but it's still sad to see it start to fail. The first sign was when, after nobly keeping us dry through the torrential rains of Pennsic last August, it finally started to leak. I guess Pennsic was just too much to ask of an aging tent. Since then, it has been leaking every time it rains. At NOWM, we gave it a good inspection and, sure enough, the the wear was obvious and it was time to retire it.

So yesterday, instead of all the piles of work we had to do, we shopped for a new tent. We would have liked to get a cool, medieval-looking tent, but they all cost a fortune, take an entire car to transport, and take at least 2 hours to set up. Without good water-proofing to boot! I lobbied for a pavilion-type set up that would at least look vaguely medieval, but J finally convinced me that such a set up wasn't really a tent and wouldn't hold up under the weather conditions we camp in. Besides, being an Eagle Scout, he simply couldn't bear the idea of buying something that wasn't really a tent. So we finally decided on a fairly regular, good quality tent. True, if you stand back and squint hard, it could look slightly more medieval than the usual tent - maybe. I keep thinking that there will come a day when money is not object - hah! Not in this lifetime, at least not for us.

Monday, June 13:

J - 12
B - 6