...and so the camping continues.

Never let it be said that we are fair weather campers. Friday night this week involved racing home loading up the car and getting to the campsite before the looming rain clouds deposited their load.

Needless to say we didn't make it and so with some trepidation as we had never pitched in the rain, we set the stopwatch (we like to time ourselves so we can improve on our pitching time) and set about pitching the tent - Mother Nature did of course wait for that exact moment to open up the heavens and deposit an ocean of water upon us - the ground sheet was like a swimming pool, before the tent was even out of its bag, and we were looking like a pair of drowned rats! Oh how we looked longingly at the motorhomes and camper vans with all their "park up and plug-in simplicity", how we wished we had upgraded, but the tent went up, the inside managed (although I'm not sure how) to stay dry and on the plus side we managed to shave 15 minutes off of our pitching time!

Typically we camp with an electric hookup but this time we opted for more "rural" camping in a big meadow - only being round the corner from the house we realised that we would have to inflate the air mattress at home and put it in the car "pre inflated", but aside from the air pump, we had no real need for electricity.... My only regret this entire weekend is that I didn't get a picture of what happened next.....  After popping home and inflating the matress, we realised that whilst it was a good plan in theory, the execution of said plan was to prove a little more challenging.... simply put, the mattress did not fit in the car!  So in between rain showers we could be found driving down the road at about 1mph with an inflated air mattress on the roof, the sun roof open and my hand holding on to the mattress for dear life, whilst periodically saying, slow down its falling off, or speed up its raining and our bed is getting wet!!!!!!  Even the simplest of tasks turns in to some kind of adventure in our world!

For all the trials and tribulations of pitching in the rain, not having an electric hook up and the adventures of the travelling air mattress, we were huddled round the gas heater eating our chips and curry (yes we cheated and got take out) thankful for our experiences. There is something quite humbling, sitting in a tent while the storm wreaks havoc outside, there is something very comforting about falling asleep to the sound of the rain falling on a tent, and there is definitely something very satisfying (and quite frankly reassuring) about waking up and finding that the tent is still standing and we survived the storm!

The rest of our weekend was great, Monkey arrived Saturday, and once again we had a weekend packed with fun memories.  The simplicity of camping is something that I thought a pre-teen boy would hate, no TV, no XBox etc. but he doesn't, he "gets it" and is as hooked on camping as we are now!