my tent pole ran away

Mt. Whitney lookin' mighty fine.

Most cozy camping ever.

Home for a weekend.

She saw this coming :)

Photos taken in March 2015 at Alabama Hills, CA.

Chase and I have a reputation for being spontaneous and unprepared campers. Or in my sister Kylie's words, "ghetto" haha. When we lived in Hawaii we camped with nothing but a tarp and sleeping bags on the sand. When we moved here we decided, "Hey, perhaps we should buy a tent?" So off to Walmart we went for the cheapest and quickest camping supplies before we upgrade (which luckily we now have). We were going to have a fun camping weekend in Alabama Hills with Ky and Spence  in our new tent. Which brings me to my next point.

The mysterious missing tent pole.

We thought we were all wise in buying a tent to actually sleep in, but I guess mother nature likes us sleeping under the stars like wild animals. For some crazy reason upon arriving to our campsite at 11:00 pm (thank you JOBS ;) ), we began setting up our tent when it hit us. Where the heck did that pole go? Oh you know, the one that holds the whole tent up!? Well, Chase and I exchanged blames and came to the consensus it grew legs and ran away. So instead of sleeping IN a tent we slept ON our tent haha. And to make it better, we had a nighttime visitor.

During the night, I was woken up by some LOUD sniffing. You know, like dog loud. Luckily, I sleep with my head inside the sleeping bag (see second photo, I'm in there). Not only did the sniffing wake me up, but I felt something walking on top of me! Once I felt that, I was wide awake and I knew I wasn't dreaming it. I remember staring at my sleeping bag 'roof' thinking what the freak haha and saying a prayer for my life. I knew it was an animal of some sort. It was heavy and decided it wanted to sniff my head a lot. Let me tell ya people, I've never been more grateful that I sleep buried in my sleeping bag. It eventually wandered off and the 'brave Lisa' kicked in and peaked outside my bag to see what the mysterious visitor was. Unfortunately, it was way too dark with little stars in the sky so I didn't see a  dang thing.

The next morning I went off to tell Ky, Spence and Chase ALL about it but no one believed me! Chase thought it was a bunny, hah! Ya, like I would be afraid of a bunny ;) I looked for tracks around our collapsed tent as evidence to my story and couldn't really find any. To this day it remains a mystery, but I know it was not a dream and have concluded it was a coyote, YIKES! Moral of the story, tents are nice to have . . . especially when you remember the poles. 

Happy camping folks!!!