Camping in the Driveway!

There are some sounds that are 'recogniseable' (is it possible to recognise something that you cannot see?) without difficulty, hah-de-dahs taking off at the crack of dawn, the hum of bees in a bruin salie, a rooster crowing in the middle of the night, owls hooting at dusk..........and metal tent poles falling on a hard surface!

Yesterday, because the caravan is standing in the driveway and there is lots of room, we decided to do a 'dry run'  and put up the tent! We wanted to make sure that the tent was complete and that we were able to erect it without a struggle! There is nothing worse than arriving at a campsite and having an audience of veteran campers sitting with their braai fires set up and smouldering, a glass of wine or a beer in hand, sniggering and shaking heads as the newcomers heave and perspire and try not to shout at each other too much. After all, these are the neighbours for the next few days!

Rob found instructions on the internet, complete with a diagram, for erecting the framework of the of the tent, showing that each pole is colour coded, so he printed it and I spent a happy few minutes with my koki pens going over each line with black, orange, green, red and yellow, corresponding with the diagram. (A minor problem, the 'G' actually stood for 'gold' and not 'green'!) Off we set and hauled out the bag of poles and the tent. So far, so good. But the coloured dots had worn off the poles and had been replaced with odd bits of masking tape with numbers 1 or 2 and bits of words like 'mid' which we presumed was 'middle'.  We managed to lie them out on the drive in their correct positions, placed the first three into the correct holders on the side of the caravan and then proceeded to fit the rest into the very nifty 'spiders' that held either four or two poles, depending where they all fitted! A bit like a metal Lego set! Sounds easy doesn't it?


And it was easy! But as we got one side right and moved to organise the other side, or the middle, the side we had done slipped and the poles escaped to land with a resounding clang on the driveway!
And then we happened to look across the field to see our friends leaning on the back of their truck, coffee mugs to hand, watching us! And of course, as I lifted my hand to wave, a few more poles clattered to the ground so we had to literally start from scratch!

Finally we had the construction completed and it looked very good! Rob then found rolls of red, yellow, black and white electrical tape and we carefully re-coloured the poles before we dismantled the frame. And updated the carefully coloured diagram!

My professionally done colour coded pole map!

Then the tent! First time we tried to thread the edge into the channel, the whole thing stuck three quarters of the way, so we pulled it back. The channel had some minor damage on the curve, so Rob used the blade of an axe to widen it and we tried again. Same story, it stuck tight, so we pulled it out again. Then, brainwave!! (Mine, I hasten to add!) He sprayed some Q 20 lubricating fluid into the groove of the channel, wiped it through and voila, the tent slid through like a hot knife through butter!

By then we were exhausted, so we packed it all up. We didn't actually put tent over frame!

Hopefully we can put it all together when we go camping and show all those sniggering, beer drinking and wine sipping campers that we too are veterans!

Watch this space!