Retracting a previous statement

Hey, you know those last two posts? Yeah, I wrote them ahead of time and set them to post in the future. Anyway, remember when I said camping was simplistic? Well, I take it back. While you guys were responding to my posted-from-the-future entries, Jason, Shorty & I were camping in the wilderness, where Mother Nature was being told by yours truly to suck it, as it started raining the precise moment we started to set up our tent, and it stopped for only one day before capping off our much-looked-forward-to-for-MONTHS camping trip by pouring as we took down everything.

There’s nothing like damp sleeping bags, jeans soaked so thoroughly you have to use one hand to hold them up while you stuff sopping heaps of canvas into bags, sitting on a towel on the drive home (while suffering from an out-of-nowhere sinus infection), and having to set up your tent again at home to dry that makes you want to kill everyone in the universe.

But, in trying to see the silver lining (in the miserable, constant rain clouds), we took total advantage of the 24 hours of sunshine to go on plenty of hikes, enjoy a walk into town for ice cream (while Shorty hovered behind us as people walked by, ever the scaredy-dog), and even eat dinner at our favorite outdoor eatery. (They didn’t allow pets, but we ordered our food to go and ate our burgers around the corner on a park bench, while Shorty sniffed our cheese curds cautiously but behaved marvelously well by not begging or mauling us as we half-expected.)

In fact, the highlight of the weekend was Shorty. He is the quintessential camping dog. He hardly barked, only whined if we were out of his sight, and generally experienced doggie heaven for 3 days. (Sunshine! Squirrels to chase! Outdoors! Walks! Sleeping with the humans!) We brought along a portable crate for him to sleep in, but he was being so cute we let him up on our air mattress with us, where he promptly curled up at our feet in a tight ball and resumed snoring. He didn’t move at all during the night and so, the next evening as soon as we got into the tent, we let him clamber up to the head of the mattress, where he tucked himself into another impossibly teeny ball of toasted-just-right-like-a-marshmallow-colored-fur between our two pillows and was asleep, instantly.