Adventures in Camping

All week Thomas had been excited to go camping once he got off work on Friday.  He got home, we packed everything up, and we were out.  The place we went to is only about a 10-15 minute drive from home.  We had looked at the forecast the night before and it said there was a chance of rain but we figured we could handle it.  Once we got there, at about 5pm, Thomas started working on getting the fire going.  We were excited because instead of having to buy wood we got some from the local park where they had been cutting down some old trees.  I set up the HUGE tent of Bea and Ivan's (they were meeting us there later).  We decided to set the tent up under the pavilion in case it did rain in the night.  As Thomas was preparing the fire I kept asking him "Are you sure this is a good idea? I see lightning?  Can lightning strike us when we are under a pavilion?"  He reassured me and I could tell that he really wanted this camping trip to workout so I let it be.  About 45 minutes after we got there the wind picked up BIG time! The tent flew through the pavilion towards the fire.  Thomas blocked it in front and I pulled it back from the back.  That's when we decided to head home.  Luckily a guy and his wife drove by right about then and he came and helped us becuase that tent was so huge and the wind was so strong we could barely keep it on the ground!  We had even put the cooler and all our other gear in the tent to hold it down and had one side of it staked to the ground but it still was flying away! We hurried and packed everything up and called Bea and Ivan to tell them not to bother heading out there. 
So Friday night we ended up cooking our foil dinners in the oven instead of over a campfire and we hung out at Bea and Ivan's watching New in Town (one of my favorite movies).
We did add to our camping collection and got an air mattress with a built in air pump.  So we'll have to have another go at camping so we can try it out. 
I would have taken a picture of the tent blowing away but we needed all hands to help hold it down. 

This is kind of what it looked like but there were only a couple of us to hold it down.