Tent Review:

Tracy and I wanted to have space when we went camping at Assateague Island, and while our old tent is still tops when it comes to blocking rain and being otherwise utterly bomber, it isn't big enough to hold a queen-sized air mattress and Afton's pack-and-play. In fact, it'd be a little cramped with the three of us, considering how much Afton thrashes around at night.
So, I bought a new tent: The Coleman Stockton 8. There's one problem. The only place that sells it is Walmart, and apparently, it comes from Coleman Canada, not Coleman USA. So, there is almost no information at all available about it, and just the few reviews on Walmart's website. We'll fix that problem right now.

Pre-camp summary:

Size: It's supposed to be able to fit "two queen air mattresses plus gear."

Strength: It uses 11mm fiberglass poles, so it won't be as strong as if they had used Aluminum poles, and the poles aren't all that thick, either. I'm iffy about how it'll take the wind.

Weather: Coleman touts it as having their WeatherTec system. We'll see.

Design: It's a dome tent with extra poles on the side stretching it into a tube. That's not a bad design, and in fact, is used in one style or another, by some pretty impressive tentmakers. One similar idea is this.

Review:

Okay, post-camp, I can give a few thoughts. First, although it is really big, it can't fit our Coleman air mattress in "portrait layout" in the tent. We had to rotate the mattress 90 degrees, and it stuck out into the center of the tent. Afton's pack and play fit it great in the other end.
Setup wasn't too difficult,although the pitch wasn't nearly as taut as I would have liked, and it looked (to me) like it was leaning to the front the entire time. Maybe if I had taken set up slower and paid more attention to it, it would have been okay. Or maybe not.
It held up to the wind just fine, and we had plenty of that. What it couldn't hold up to, though, was a long steady soaking rain. It rained from 11 pm until 8 am our last night, and the tent showed it. In a few places, the fabric was saturated and started soaking through, in a few places water spray was coming in around the rain fly through the mesh and onto the tent, and it was starting to puddle on the bathtub floor, but we were dry because we were on top of a tall air matress. 5 years ago, Tracy and I weathered a similar, but more intense, rainstorm in our smaller, also Coleman, dome tent without any problems at all. In that storm, we were the driest people in the campground. In this one, we weren't.

In summary, I could have just pitched it sloppily, but I don't think so. For large groups and mostly fair weather, with just a chance or two of short rain squalls, even fairly intense ones, this tent should do fine. If you really expect nasty weather, though, get something with more coverage on the fly, or higher sidewalls and less mesh.

Beach vacation

We went up to Assateague Island, which up a little past the Chesapeake Bay area to go camping for a couple of days. It was a lot of fun, minus the lack of shade. We were camping right on the beach and couldn't get the canopy up, so it was a little hot. Afton was terrified of the sand the first day. She refused to step in it or touch it. Anytime I tried, she would just pick up her feet. I tried running sand over her legs, and she would just cry. We were eating dinner, and she dropped her sippy cup in the sand and started bawling. It was pretty funny. Thankfully, she got used to it the next day and had fun on the beach. She didn't like the water at all. The only way we could get her in was to hold her and then she liked it when the waves splashed her. I was totall shocked because Afton usually loves the water and isn't scared of anything. I think she really enjoyed running up and down the beach, chasing her ball. She enjoyed the sea shells as well. The park also had a nice playground that Afton really enjoyed. She is in love with slides.


For dinner the next night, we were grilling a couple of steaks and a seagull came and grabbed the steak right of the grill. Who does that? So we went and grabbed a couple of burgers from a nearby restaurant.

Joe stubbed his toe on the picnic table and it turned a nasty purple and had swollen a pretty good size.


My feet and shins got horribly sunburned. I don't think I will be using the spray sun block again. I couldn't walk for like 2 days afterwards; Joe even had to take a couple more days off work to take care of Afton since I was a gimp. I did manage to read all 7 Harry Potter books from Wednesday night through Saturday morning so I guess not all was lost. :) Overall, the beach was a fun little vacay and is definitely worth a return trip.

For some reason, we didn't get a lot of good pics in. Oh well, maybe next time!

Bad Bad Cocoa

Afton is doing great. She is a very active girl. Her new favorite thing is to climb up on the dining room chairs and stand and bounce on them. She gets really mad when I lay all the chairs down so she can't do any climbing. Its kind of funny to watch her throw a temper tantrum. She's speaking more now. "Bye, bye!" is probably her favorite phase.

So a couple of weeks ago, Cocoa grabbed a loaf of bread from the table and ate the whole thing. I was so mad when I realized what she had done; since I had just bought the bread the day before. So I was yelling at Cocoa, saying things like: Bad dog, bad dog when I realize Afton was joining in the yelling as well. She kept yelling; "ba Cocoa, ba cocoa! and shaking her little fist. It was hilarious! So now I guess I have to start watching what I say!

Afton's burn

Afton burned herself today. She pulled a hot bowl of oatmeal down onto herself. This is what the blisters looked like as of 6:00 tonight. She was pretty happy, though, so we'll just worry about infections when they pop.

She's actually happy here, but our flash is huge, and makes everybody blink. It makes me try not to use it.

Quiz answers:

Unfortunately, nobody seemed to care about my question. Annoying. The correct answers is: a circus or carnival performer who bites the heads off of live animals, especially chickens.

Thus, in a technical sense, one could call Ozzy Osbourne a geek! Not that I'd do that, because he'll curse at me until my head explodes. Of course, I won't be able to understand any of it, so maybe I should.

Quick quiz:

Okay, without checking any sources, what is the orginal, technical meaning of "geek"? This is not a trick question. Any web searches or using reference material are grounds for disqualification. (Sadly enough, I once knew this myself, but had forgotten it.)