The camping trip that went sideways

We booked one night. Forty minutes away. A campsite you could see a main road from — which after a summer of free days out felt like an extravagance.

This was deliberate and it is the only genuinely good decision in this entire note, because everything else went wrong and none of it mattered.

The airbed

We took one double airbed for two adults, on the reasonable basis that there were two of us.

By half two in the morning there were four people on it. By three there was also a dog. Bramble is fourteen and had made a firm and non-negotiable decision about where she was sleeping, and she is not a large dog but she is a long one, and she sleeps diagonally.

Tom spent the second half of the night on a camp mat on the ground and reported, in the morning, that it was considerably better, which is a sentence containing several separate pieces of information.

The thing we did not know: cold comes up. The air was fine — it was July — and what woke both children at four was the ground, through a thin mat, and no amount of extra blankets on top does anything about that.

It was not dark

I don’t know what I thought would happen. I think I thought that bedtime would happen because bedtime happens.

It was light at nine. It was light at half nine. It was, by any standard he was prepared to accept, the afternoon, and a three-year-old in a bright orange tent at half past nine in July is not a child who is going to be talked into anything.

Then it was light again at twenty to five.

The blackout liner is now the first thing in the bag. On the second trip, in August, both of them were asleep by half eight and I sat outside feeling like somebody who had solved something, which I had, five weeks late.

The cooking

I planned a proper meal. Two rings, no surface, no light by the time we got to it, and a twelve-minute queue at the tap with a pan.

It took an hour and ten minutes and was eaten, cold, at nine o’clock, by nobody except me.

Second trip: sandwiches on the first night, made at home, in a box. Cooking is a second-night activity, when you know where things are, in daylight, having slept.

The garden

We put the tent up in the garden once, in June, and were pleased with ourselves.

What we had never done was take it back down, which is a completely different job with its own problems, and which we attempted for the first time in a field in the rain at eleven the next morning with two children who had had four hours’ sleep between them. The poles go back in the bag in one specific way. There is no other way. We found this out over about thirty-five minutes.

Do it twice. Up, down, up. Preferably with the children there, so they are bored of it before you are standing in a field being watched by a man with a much better tent.

The head torches

One each, including Rowan, who received his with the reverence of a small knighthood and wore it at breakfast, indoors, in daylight.

Best three pounds of the trip, and the reason a head torch is on Tom’s list of three.

We’re going again

Three nights, in August, and further away, which after all of the above may look like a failure of judgement.

But the actual result of one bad night forty minutes from home is that we now know four specific things we didn’t know, none of which we could have read, and all of which cost us one night’s sleep and about thirty pounds. Nell has told the story of the dog on the airbed at least eleven times.