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!

Yogurt in a Yurt

This past weekend Dave and I drove four hours north to Killarney Provincial Park. Our quest? To go winter camping in a yurt. What, you may well ask, is a yurt? To me it sounds just like yogurt, or something you might pick up at IKEA, but a yurt is a slightly more permanent version of a tent. The ones in Killarney and in Algonquin parks are insulated and come equipped with an electric heater and lights. So no big roughing it, sleep-wise. Bathroom-wise was another story. The nearest outhouse was a quarter of a mile away. When it's cold outside, you want to make sure you really have to go to the bathroom before you venture to the outhouse. If you're like me, cold air makes you want to pee all the more so, technically, you could walk a quarter mile to the outhouse, pee, walk back and realize you have to pee again, walk back to the outhouse, pee, walk... well, you get the idea. The best thing I brought along was a pee pot – more valuable than gold when your bladder is full to burst in the middle of the night.

This is Mohawk. He was a regular visitor at our campsite, chattering our ears and giving us crap as red squirrels are wont to do. Dave nicknamed him Mohawk because of his weird tail. It looks like he had it cut and dyed at one of those metalhead smoke shops downtown. Not that I would know anything about such shops.

The yurt came with several amenities including a barbecue, electrical outlets and mattresses but, alas, it didn't come with a dishwasher. Luckily I brought my own - the Super Duty Dave. See the toboggan in the background? That's how we hauled all our gear from the parking lot to the yurt, a distance of about three-quarters of a mile (the park roads are closed in winter so you have to hoof it.) That wouldn't be too far if it was flat ground but flat it wasn't – there was a mighty big hill up to climb and I was out of puff just bringing the crap in and out.

There wasn't a lot of snow in Killarney (the lady who works in the park office says they don't get much, for some reason) but there was enough to strap on the cross-country skis and give it a whirl. And here I thought I was in shape.... pffft! My legs are still killing me from a few hours out on the trail. Why do I keep thinking I'm 25?????

Handsome hunkaroo husband extraordinaire out on the trails. He does improve the scenery, don't you think? We saw a ton of animal tracks while we were out and about: white-tailed deer, marten, otter, fox, partridge, wolf or coyote, and plenty of red squirrel. Deer tracks were everywhere but we never did spot one. They're like ghosts in the forest; or statues. So hard to see. But they were watching us – a half an hour after we passed one area, we returned to see fresh deer tracks on top of our ski tracks. 

Our yurt! Isn't it cute? 

A little fuzzy, but I thought you might want to see inside. Bunk beds, plastic chairs, plastic tables, a heater and a shelf. That's it! And, I've gotta say, the yurts aren't cheap: two nights cost nearly 200 bucks. For that kind of money you could get a nice hotel room for the weekend – one with an indoor pool, a jacuzzi and an inside toilet! 

Dave eating yogurt in the yurt. For some reason we thought we were just hilarious saying that. That's my coffeemaker I dragged along on the toboggan. I brought a fancy coffee for the excursion. Muskoka Roastery's maple flavour. Yum-o.

We also did a lot of reading on our Kindles. Dave was reading Quick and the Dead by Louis L'Amour and I thoroughly enjoyed Blood and Fire, the cool new offering from Carrie Clevenger and Nerine Dorman. I flew through that puppy. It was almost as delicious as my coffee, and that's saying something! Carrie has promised me an interview with her lead character, vampire Xan Marcelles, in the near future. So stay tuned... Speaking of reading, I want to thank everyone who read my Friday Flash last week. It was the first one I wrote for ages. I had been talking to Carrie and she was saying how much she missed the Friday Flash crew, being such a busy novelist now. I realized I missed it too, so sat down and wrote Funeral Sandwiches. I didn't get a chance to read other people's flash because we were internet-less in the yurt, but I will this week, I promise. I also have something exciting planned - Letters from a Friend, a series of letters from some of the bloggers who have had the biggest impact on me. I've received the first one from Laurita Miller and it is FABULOUS. Brought me to tears, it did. I can hardly wait to share it with you. For now, I'm off to work. Happy Monday, everyone!