After work Friday, I was ready to get out of the office and into the forest. I thought I was going to wrap up around 15:00, but I had to take care of some last minute business that took me closer to 16:30. I decided to pack *all* of my gear and go somewhere where I could set up camp close to my car.
Since I didn’t have to fit all of my gear in my backpack and carry it on my back, I decided to take my Tentsile Flite tree tent, which is sort of a double hammock that is suspended between 3 trees and looks kind of like a spaceship. It’s pretty cool to hang out in, until you add the rain fly, and then it offers no visibility of the surrounding area and it’s more difficult to get in and out. Personally, I think the rain fly for that tent was an afterthought, because the rest of the design is pretty cool (assuming you can tote the extra weight).
It’s because I hate the rain fly that I opted to throw a ground cover over my sleeping bag to keep the dew off. I took my favorite, cozy sleeping bag … which is another piece of gear I don’t take backpacking because it weighs close to 8 pounds.
Had we just had a heavy dew, I would have been fine, but it misted and drizzled all night and the “floor” of the Flite is waterproof, so water that collected where my ground cloth didn’t cover, or that ran off my ground cloth, eventually seeped underneath me, so I wasn’t as warm as I might have been, had I kept everything dry. I’m not sure why I haven’t learned this lesson. Since I’ve been in North Carolina, I don’t think I’ve had one dry night under the stars. If I neglected the rain fly, I always regretted it; at least a little.
It was a long, restless night. When daylight finally came, the clothes I had carelessly laid next to me were pretty much soaked and it was about 50 degrees; just cold enough that wet clothes were not ideal. I got mostly dressed and went to my car where I had some dry clothes to change into. After that, the morning was pretty uneventful. I rekindled the fire, made coffee, ate a protein bar and slowly packed up my gear and tossed it in the back seat of my car, so I could take it home and hang it all out to dry.
As it turned out, the sun was coming out as I was getting loaded up to leave, so Fred and I walked down to the creek and I explored a little before driving home to deal with my weekend chores.
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