This trip was just a weekend at a local campground. Nothing exciting but it gave me a chance to try out some new gear. The primary new gear that I wanted to test was my new Ogee Tarp. I was hoping that we'd get a nice rainstorm this weekend but, for the first weekend in a while in MI, no such luck. I do love the tarp though.
When I got there on Friday there was a nice breeze blowing but I had no problems hanging the tarp. I'm using Opie's tarp line and it's as easy as can be to get everything up and in place. And it's very nice to only need two stakes for the tarp. I tried out OldGringo's idea of putting shock cord on the doors and wrapping it around the trees to close them off and that works really well.
I'm using Mac's 5 in 1 Jerry Chair as my summer UQ. This is my third time out with it and, so far, it's been great. I really like that I don't have to worry about it getting wet since it's covered with silnylon. For this trip I decided I would try using my idi gear all in 1 poncho as a TQ since it's also IX. I really wanted this to work since it would mean that it wouldn't matter if the TQ got wet either but it ended up being a lot of material to struggle with and that caused some problems for me.
Friday night's low was around 53. I got in and got situated and was fine with the TQ until around 1:30 am. There was a commotion down at the next campsite that woke me up. I sat up and looked out of the hammock and watched a group of about 12-15 guys walk down towards my site. I was kind of freaked out about it because I was the last site on that road and there was nowhere for these guys to go. They all came down and milled around my car so I called out and asked them what they were looking for. A couple of them flashed their lights my way and then they all turned around and walked back out. It was very weird and woke me completely up. As I got settled back in I was fighting with the TQ to get it back around me and ended up kicking my UQ off-kilter. I dozed off so it took awhile for me to cool down enough to realize that there were cold spots and to re-situate everything. Then, around 2:30 - 3 am I get hit with a flashlight again. This time a guy and a girl had wandered down to the turn-around loop near my site. They proceeded to have a very loud "conversation" for about 20 minutes, sort of a half fight / half laughing thing. Then they headed off to another site where it sounded like them met up with friends. I couldn't really hear them talking anymore but the girl had a very definitive laugh (think braying donkey) that I could hear off and on. I was awake again though and, when I'm awake I tend to shift around a lot so I ended up having another struggle with the TQ trying to get all the material situated and somehow kicked the shock cord on the UQ again so I ended up with more cold spots.
As I was struggling with getting the footbox under the shock cord, I got to thinking that Paul's triangle thingie's would have come in very handy at this point in time. I'm pretty sure that they will pull the shock cord over the footbox in a better line so even if I kicked at them they would sort of naturally fall above the foot box. I came home an ordered a set so I can test out my theory.
The other new stuff I tried out was a Bug Shirt and the Off Clip on. The Bug Shirt is great and is perfect for wearing around a campfire when the nights are a little cool. The first night I wore it to bed. I wanted to see if it would work in place of the bug net on the hammock and I think it would. It ended up being cool enough that night that the bugs weren't really a problem so I never actually tried to sleep with the netting over my face but, with a baseball cap, I'm pretty sure it would work and be comfortable.
I was pleasantly surprised at how well the Off Clip On worked. I hooked it on my chair by the campfire and never noticed any bugs until I walked away from the chair. When I was hanging out without it on and the bugs showed up, they immediately disappeared when I turned it on. And the little fan in it works great for stoking little twig fires.
Overall, everything did what it needed to do and I ended up having a very nice relaxing weekend, which was awesome!
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