January camping: done!

January 19, 2013. As you probably know, Dave and I are rabid campers. Last year we camped in all but four months of the year. In 2013 we vowed to camp in every one. That resolution is a little harder to keep in the winter months when most campgrounds are closed, so we decided to camp in our backyard, in a tent. Friends have asked us why on earth we chose a tent when we have a perfectly comfortable trailer outside, but where's the challenge in a trailer that has a furnace? The whole point is to find adventure! And we've always wondered it it was possible to stay warm in a tent during the deepest darkest nights of Canadian winter.

Ben, our singing cat, watched us with bemused interest.

The weather forecast was weird, to say the least. It rained most of the day and only started to snow about four o'clock in the afternoon, when it was time to set up. We started with a blue tarp hung from one of our cedar trees. 

There were wind warnings that night so we held the tarp down with wood from our woodpile. We also used tent pegs to keep the tarp in place. This was trickier than it sounds, because the ground was (and still is) frozen solid. Dave used a cordless drill to make holes in the icy ground for the pegs. The tarp itself was meant to be a shield from the wind and the rain/snow mix that was coming down.

When the tarp was up, we placed another tarp on the ground, followed by cardboard, followed by the tent. (Ermagherd, that tent stunk. It had been in storage for years and had the delightful fragrance of must.) We laid a thick blanket on the bottom of the tent, followed by two mattresses from our trailer and sleeping bags. Then we made a "tarp sandwich" (two tarps with a blanket in between) and laid it on top of the tent. You need to have some sort of insulation between your warm breath and the cold outdoors, otherwise you have condensation dripping inside the tent and all over you. 

It was looking pretty cosy inside!

Our trailer mattresses. So soft! My old carcass can't take sleeping on the cold, hard ground.

Bedtime! Dave snuggles in. It was actually HOT inside that tent. I kicked off my sleeping bag and laid on top of it without any covers until the middle of the night, when Dave covered me up.

Doesn't that look awesome? It was really snowing by bedtime.  Sometime during the night we got a thunderstorm. I didn't hear a thing – when I sleep, I'm dead to the world, but Dave said it was wicked and it was all everybody was talking about on Facebook the next day.

Not bad, eh? The light from the woodshed made our impromptu house look as warm as it felt.

Bedtime! That's me looking all scary and weird in the harsh shadows thrown by our flashlight. Mere minutes after this was taken I fell fast asleep. Dave had some things on his mind that night, however, and he laid awake for hours. Finally at about 4 a.m. he woke me up to say he was going inside to try and get some shut-eye. "You can stay out here if you want," he said. I was like, NO, I am not staying out in the yard by myself in a thunder-snowstorm! So I toddled in the door behind him. It was warm as toast in there - the only thing I'd do different next time is buy a tent that doesn't stink. It took me all day to wash all the sleeping bags and pillows that got stunk up!