Bags and Baggage

The Family Camping Chronicles: Part II

I relegated myself to sleeping in a sleeping bag the other night.  No, it’s not like that.  I wasn’t in the wife’s doghouse.  There’s a perfectly good queen sized bed in one of the extra rooms that comes in very handy for when the kids visit or when the domestic seas get choppy.  My purpose this night was to test the bedding for the upcoming family camping trip. 

I inflated our airbed and laid it out on the bedroom floor.  Our dog Rainey found it all very stimulating and what must have looked to her like a giant dog bed had her running down the hall and then back into the room to take a look, back down the hall and then back into the room.  She repeated this doggy drama over and over until my little berth was all set up at which point she just wagged her tail and looked at me waiting to see what excitement would follow.  I crawled into a sleeping bag and started to read.  Rainey seemed thrilled that one of the humans was going to be sleeping down on her level and so she curled up next to the big blue airbed and used it as a nose rest.  I read a few pages and sensed that the surface below me seemed to be getting awfully hard; kind of like a solid floor.  I noticed that I was also losing altitude.  A few minutes later the bed was limp, sagging and gasping out its last breaths.  We have two airbeds and we knew that one has a leak.  “Well I guess I found the leaker,” I told Cora as I climbed into bed.  “I’ll test the other one later this week.”

Before the airbed test I went to pull our two sleeping bags from under our bed (we store them unrolled under the bed so they keep their loft).  There’s a powder blue bag that I’m very familiar with because every now and then Rainey pulls it out from under the bed, lays a bone down behind it and tries, unsuccessfully to push the cache back under the bed with her nose.  As I pulled out the blue bag I noticed another behind it so I pulled that out.  What’s this?  Behind the second bag was a third.  I pulled that out and found a fourth.  Behind the fourth and tucked way up under the headboard was yet another.  It seemed that I’d struck a vein of sleeping bags under the bed; a bag bonanza. 

I called out to Cora, “Where in the hell did all these sleeping bags come from?”  After scratching our heads a bit and wondering why we had 3 extra sleeping bags we finally remembered that before our last camping trip when the kids were in their teens we’d outfitted everyone with new bags.  What the hell, we’re the ones that don’t remember our own anniversary until we’re two or three days late.  This weekend I’m planning a little expedition under the bed to see what else might be there – more camping gear; clothes; money; lost stock certificates; maybe a 1953 Mickey Mantle baseball card or a Rembrandt.