I went out on Friday afternoon to get camp ready then a quick trip back into town to pick up the rest of the weekend's participants- Megan and our dogs, Daisy and Jackson. We had made it by supper time and immediately started a camp fire as the temperature started to drop- or we tried at least, given that the wood was quite wet from a good rainfall the day before. The wood was so wet, that when we finally managed to get the fire going we could hear the hissing of steam quite some distance away, and see the water boiling out of the logs as they burned!
Our tent was another matter- as a Coleman tent it is quite good quality, but it is unfortunately a warm weather tent, with large mesh panels barely covered by the fly, and with temperatures dropping overnight to just a few degrees above freezing, well, I don't have to tell you that our sleeping bags were chosen quite carefully!
During the trip I noted that the clear brand winner for the weekend was in fact Coleman- not only was the tent a Coleman, but also so was the sleeping bag, stove, the propane for the stove, the cooler, the camp chairs, and the lantern would have been a Coleman as well, except that I had accidentally forgotten it on the kitchen counter when I left. Instead I used a battery powered LED lantern from GE.
Overall it was a great trip, with lots of opportunities to cook over an open fire as well as on the Coleman stove. I also fired up the Bio Lite camp stove for the fun of it, and while I didn't actually cook anything on it, I did a little experiment, but more on that later!
Even the SOG Entrenching Tool got in on the action, helping to clean out the fire pit since the ash had built up pretty good this late in the season.
We all had a great time and are looking forward to next spring when we can do it again!