Do you have a family camping tent that has been sitting in the garage for a couple years? I did until last summer when we all decided that we needed to go out with our tents for family camping.
So we go out into the garage and I climb into the attic where we have stored all of our family camping tents.
Then we toss them straight in to the back of the car along with all the other camping equipment and take off for our trip...
So we drive the hour to the state park and get out of the car.
We start to unpack; first we get the cooler then we are after the bedding and the dry food.
So when we have unloaded most everything else we get to the tents and toss them down.
We each drag a tent to where we picked to set it up and we begin to unroll them.
So we are trying to remember how this thing goes together, since it was years ago that we last used our tents for family camping.
I have my daughter go into the tent and lift up the center.
Just then she starts screaming at the top of her lungs and takes off running out of our neglected tent.
She just screams over and over about spiders in the tent.
And come to find out there are massive amounts of spiders that were saturating this tent, coming out of every corner! So once we start to investigate the tent area we find out there are massive holes in the fabric of this tent and literally like a thousand spiders coming out of the folds of tent that just laid there on the ground.
This almost ruined our family outing.
But I got back into the car and drove 45 minutes back to civilization where the local sports and outdoor store was, went inside and bought two brand new family size tents for us use.
In the end all was well and we had one of the best family retreats we ever had and till this day we still talk about what happened that day to our poor family camping tent and how my daughter ran screaming from it.
Scared to death of the spider-infested tent.
So that is what happened to our tent that was sitting in the garage collecting dust.
It was quickly scooped up and put into the camp grounds dumpster and we never saw it again but believe me the memory that tent will not die any time soon.
The point of the story is to know your camping equipment and take good care of it, even in storage.
If not, you might just have some visitors already enjoying your camping gear like we did.
So we go out into the garage and I climb into the attic where we have stored all of our family camping tents.
Then we toss them straight in to the back of the car along with all the other camping equipment and take off for our trip...
So we drive the hour to the state park and get out of the car.
We start to unpack; first we get the cooler then we are after the bedding and the dry food.
So when we have unloaded most everything else we get to the tents and toss them down.
We each drag a tent to where we picked to set it up and we begin to unroll them.
So we are trying to remember how this thing goes together, since it was years ago that we last used our tents for family camping.
I have my daughter go into the tent and lift up the center.
Just then she starts screaming at the top of her lungs and takes off running out of our neglected tent.
She just screams over and over about spiders in the tent.
And come to find out there are massive amounts of spiders that were saturating this tent, coming out of every corner! So once we start to investigate the tent area we find out there are massive holes in the fabric of this tent and literally like a thousand spiders coming out of the folds of tent that just laid there on the ground.
This almost ruined our family outing.
But I got back into the car and drove 45 minutes back to civilization where the local sports and outdoor store was, went inside and bought two brand new family size tents for us use.
In the end all was well and we had one of the best family retreats we ever had and till this day we still talk about what happened that day to our poor family camping tent and how my daughter ran screaming from it.
Scared to death of the spider-infested tent.
So that is what happened to our tent that was sitting in the garage collecting dust.
It was quickly scooped up and put into the camp grounds dumpster and we never saw it again but believe me the memory that tent will not die any time soon.
The point of the story is to know your camping equipment and take good care of it, even in storage.
If not, you might just have some visitors already enjoying your camping gear like we did.