She said, "But it is raining outside!"
I woke up this morning on one of my days off to the nice sound of rain hitting the bedroom window. My son and I have been waiting for a chance to try out his blue walmart tarp setup idea over his hammock so today was the day.
We had a quick breakfast and started getting things together when my wife asked what we were doing. "We are going to test out tarp setups for the hammock." "Oh- but its raining outside," she said. "Precisely." I replied. She shook her head and muttered- a sign that I am off my rocker again and that men do things that do not make sense.
We set up the tarp in a diamond shape fairly quickly and put up the hammock. I was able to do this in our back yard even though it does not have any trees. This is possible because it suddenly occurred to me that the expensive wooden play set I built for my children years ago (that only I touch when it is time to cut the grass and weed-eat) might prove useful as a hammock hanging spot. All I had to do was move one of the A frame supports out to the end of the swingset bar and we had just enough room for two hammocks. Brilliant!
Back to the story.
Now it is raining much harder and my son is comfortably settled in to his hammock. There is just enough room for me to crouch under the tarp next to him and enjoy that wonderful sound of rain and a light breeze. I was able to show him the benefits of improvised drip loops too.
We were out there when a new geocache was published in the area -another fanatical hobby of mine- and since he was beginning to get bored and he wanted to snag a first-to-find I figured why not. We were already a little damp and maybe the rain would hold off other first-to-find fanatics.
We decided to leave it set up to see how effective it was at keeping the hammock dry and off we went.
We snagged the FTF on the cache and did a few other caches that had popped up since I last covered that area and then headed home for lunch and a look at the hammock.
My son wanted to change into dry clothes and then dive into some first person shooter video game action instead of messing with the hammock, so after lunch he headed his way and I took off to the back yard. The hard rain and light breeze had not gotten to the hammock much to my surprise. Oh, this is too good to pass up I thought, so I made a hot cup of coffee, grabbed my small folding camp table and a Clancy hardback and settled in for some lovely quiet ME time. AHHHHHHH.
This is the life. My first hang in the rain with no one around. I pulled out my phone to snap a photo and instead found it was in video mode.So I thought I would share it with my new hammockforum friends.
I found the drip pattern under the climbing ramp interesting and unusual. The railroad spike kept tarp flapping to a minimum and was something I did just to show my son. I also set up a rainwater collection point under a drip loop on the other tarp guyline. He thought collecting and drinking rainwater was an interesting idea so I showed him how. It tasted like the tarp though. :)
My wife does not understand, but I know y'all do.:D
-Sarge
