THE NEW TENT.
Day 61 – The campground has done a bit of emptying out after the weekend. It’s been fairly quiet. Rob headed outside by the water with his coffee & camera first thing this morning. He took a lot more great pictures. There are SO many birds here!
Click any picture below to see a slideshow.
Rob put up the new tent, and as the advertisements & reviews stated, it was very easy to set up. This obviously was important to him because at times we put up & take down our tent often, and it can be time consuming and labor intensive. It looks good. We’ll try it out later. We may get thunderstorms later today, a good test to see how it holds up.
Okay, so we ended up spending a good portion of the day in our new tent, and it was great. The temperature high for the day was 79 degrees, but it was humid and the dewpoint was high, making it feel MUCH warmer. The new screened tent was cooler than inside the RV. It seems to be very well made. We have the new camping pad that we’d hoped would act as a floor to the screened tent; it works and we like it, except because it is not attached to the bottom sides of the tent, we still get plenty of crawly bugs – ants, ticks, spiders, etc. While those bugs are not mosquitoes and biting flies, we’d prefer NO bugs. Rob saw that there were some velcro attachments along the bottom of the tent, so he went online & discovered they do have a floor that can be attached to this tent. He ordered it. We’ve also ordered the outside rain shield panels that can be attached to protect the tent from a rain storm. When those items arrive, we will essentially have the tent that we wanted to replace the trusty old tent we lost.
After showers, we christened the new tent with beer and wine for happy hour. During the time we spent outside the rest of today, Rob got lots more pictures of birds as this is a wonderful place for bird watching. The ones that are not water birds frequent the many thick bushes between campsites and along the water; the birds that hang around water are plentiful, also. While we were in the tent, we saw a young deer approach the water, walk through the reeds, and then walk into the water to pull up and eat water lily pads. She was quite enthusiastic, pulling them up and dragging them into the reeds and chewing them away until there was nothing left. Who knew deer ate water lilies?!
It did not rain today as forecast, but now it’s expected to rain tonight starting around 3 a.m. We are still interested in seeing how the new tent does. Goodnight, everyone.