Can I tell you what happened when I decided to procrastinate cleaning and packing up my apartment?
I can, okay great.
Well I decided that I would throw some weight (a sleeping bag, 2 – 5lb weights, my tent, and 6 hymnals … to be exact!) in my pack … I know for a fact that all that weighed AT LEAST 25 or 30lbs, haha (it soo felt like more!)… but for my first trial with weight in my pack since purchasing it, it seemed like a good start.
So I went down to the lake and strapped my pack on, I couldnt figure out how to secure my tent to the outside of my pack so it just stayed on the inside, which for now, works, when I have clothes to add to the mix, that will not work, at all!
So I proceed to hike towards the lake and realize that I do in fact love my pack, but it definitely feels like Im in some mandatory posture class with my shoulders being held back at some unheard of non-slouched position, but ehh … par for the course. I get to the lake and I hike to the second open field – probably like half a mile (maybe not that much, but maybe, haha, it sounds legit). Then I decide it’s now or never … I have an open field … I have a tent … let’s do this!
So I wanted to time myself for this grand tent set up adventure – its just a 2 pole set up, how long can it really take? Well … first thing’s first, time to get the tent out and lay out all the stuff that comes with it – followed with reading myself the directions (out loud, mind you … I process better that way).
So I get the easy part done, poles assembled and tent laid out flat … now I am supposed to feed these poles through the tent thing like criss cross diagonal … Okay simple enough, right? Well once I figured out that I wasn’t supposed to be feeding the pole through what I later learned was the seam … after much speculation and confused faces and inspection and trying to analyze the pictures provided … I realized there were these loopy things (color coordinated, mind you – gray across one diagonal and orange across the other diagonal, DUH, sometimes I even baffle myself when I can’t connect dots like that) so I feed the poles through these, then I return to my handy dandy directions.
So okay, Im glad I knew what it meant when it said to stick the end of the poles through the gromets at each corner – what I didnt understand was that doing this by yourself could prove to be kind of DUMB … I would get one side done, then have to fight with the tent to bend this otherwise straight pole into an arch so it could go through the other corner. The first pole was much easier than the second one. Having half the tent assembled for some reason creates a more challenging tension dynamic – ugh, like I said, DUMB.
So the final step was the DUMBEST step … there’s these clippy things on each of the loopy things that are supposed to snap to the pole things. But the direction things do NOT specify that you need to ensure that these clippy things are on a certain side of the loopy things before setting up the pole things because if you don’t, the clippy things won’t clip and you have to get the dumb poles out of the dumb grommets, focus and calculate which side of the loopy thing you need to ensure the clippy thing is – to not have to repeat this process yet again .. so like I said, focus is key! So after getting all the clippy things on the correct side of the loopy things I yet again went through the tension dynamic fight to assemble the tent. Then you just clip the clippy things to the pole – easy enough now, right? Of course not, these clippy things hurt and don’t like to clip! There’s a 90% chance I will not use the dumb clippy things in the future.
So then I add the rainfly for authenticity which was actually pretty easy after figuring out which side was the front, and realizing that I needed to change the length of the corner clips to have the proper tension … so TIME!
This grand adventure took a whopping 30 minutes for a 2 pole tent … fabulous! (And that’s without staking it to the ground so who knows how much longer that will take – ahhhh!)
So to end this adventure I decided to time how long it would take me to disassemble the tent and get it packed up … this really was easy and would have taken next to no time had it not been for those infamous DUMB clippy things that are as “easy” to unclip as they were to clip.
This part took 12 minutes … lovely!
And now you know … So, the following video is probably how I looked trying to figure out what I was doing, minus the flies and mosquitos – God knew I didn’t need anymore distractions … this endeavor took some serious FOCUS!
YAY WORLD RACE! I’m still in need of your support – I’m just a couple hundred dollars away from my KENYA GOAL of $6,000 … please, please, please help me board that plane so my tent practice wasn’t in vain (haha!) but more importantly – help me serve the world like God has called me to do … all your donations are helping to further the Kingdom! Click here to donate! Much love, and thanks for reading about my tent adventure!
