The VDP's go buckeye: A tale of two poles

It’s tough getting back into the groove of writing posts again. I’m gonna be brutally honest, Ohio is a tiny bit boring so far. I mean, it’s really nice, don’t get me wrong. But people here are weirdly normal. We went into a bank, and this guy named Fabian just gave us a bank account. No questions asked…….well some questions asked, but we could answer them all just fine. Actually, it did get a little weird when Fabian asked Pete if he regularly manicured his nails, b/c they were so perfectly trimmed and even. Like the seriously awesome wife that I am, I decided to step back and just let this situation unfold. Unfortunately Pete just squashed this entre possible awesomeness by saying ‘no, no he does not regularly trim and manicure his perfectly shaped nails.’ Pete can be a total buzz kill sometimes. Anyway, back to boring Ohio, everything has gone fairly smoothly. We’re in an apartment, learning our way around town, all of our stuff from England was actually waiting for us when we arrived, and we even had internet like 3 days after we moved in. WHAT?!? All incredibly normal and boring.

In light of all the boringness, here is a little diddy from the end of the summer. We headed up to Mt. Rainier for a little camping. We love camping, and somehow had gone all summer without pulling out our gear. We didn’t have a tent, b/c for some insane reason, we shipped it to England with us, like we were gonna go camping in the middle of sheep pastures or something. Thankfully UB came through for us, and let us borrow his. You can read more about his generosity here.

We pulled into the campsite where our friends were waiting for us. We decide to set up our tent before we head out for the day. As we pull out the tent, and the rain starts to fall, it becomes apparent that we are missing some key items. The tent is there, the rain fly is there, and we have about 500 yellow stakes, and 80 feet of rope. And we have 2 short poles. 2 poles that don’t bend, and clearly don’t fit in our tent. Thankfully we were camping with two engineers. Pete could have explained the etymology of the word tent, and I probably could’ve sketched our incomplete tent, but left to our own devices, we probably would’ve driven back into town and bought a new tent, or just stayed at the local motel. But, our trusty engineers leaped into action, adn we had a functioning tent in no time! Thankfully I had the foresight to fully document the process.