back again

[derien]

Our hats have the crushed and beaten look of hats that have been there and back again. And they weren't even out in the six hours of rain while we were putting up the new tent. That was a bad start to the trip - never put up a new tent in the rain. Normally it's raining when we arrive and we put up a tarp, which takes us a few minutes and we're not too damp, and the next day it's better weather and stuff gets dry again. This time it rained all through the night, it let up enough so that we started out hiking (got sprinkled on a few times during the hike, not enough to really be worth talking about). But nothing got dry. When your jeans are soaked through you know they'll take forever, but even my thin cotton shirt just couldn't seem to dry.

Then the fridge stopped working. Only long enough for all the food to spoil, and then it started working again, just as inexplicably. Possibly it was the excessively damp weather.

Then the sink leaked onto the dishes in the cabinet beneath. Which really is kind of minor, but it was annoying to have to wash more dishes when dish washing is really a pain in the ass back, because you end up hunched over so often. The sink is just low enough to be ergonimically incorrect for even a shorty like me. I can't imagine tall German people doing dishes at this sink. It's a good thing I'm as short as I am - I can almost stand in the van with the top down without bumping my head too often. Although by the end of the third day I had bumped my head so often it was beginning to hurt and I was getting irritable about it. Because of course we didn't want the top up with the rain.



However, we slept dry, which as Eor points out is a gigantic accomplishement in torrential rains. We weren't particularly uncomfortable, actually, and we could still have tea and lie in a snug bed reading in the evenings. The hiking went well - I made it up Cannon and back down, although I didn't think I'd be able to when we started up. :) That went really amazingly smoothly. I wore my old sneakers (the ones Looks to Alaska gave me years ago after she had worn them for a summer or so, and they were second-hand when she got them) rather than the expensive hiking boots, and my toes were a bit sore but I had no blisters. (I feel a little guilty about that because I spent so much money on the hiking boots, but they're still good boots for the winter and all.) I need some new sneakers that fit me as well as those old ones.

All in all, I feel happy with the trip. We had some fun, some things went quite well, and the things that didn't we coped with well. And even an imperfect camping trip is miles better than work. ;)