Humans thrive on our stories, and those of us brave souls that love long road trips do have stories to tell! These stories have a habit of lasting for years, and they seem to get more interesting with time.
Little Disasters Make the Funniest Stories
When they happen little disasters really seem like major disasters. You are sometimes scared, often miserable, and usually beyond frustrated. But you know what? With time these little disasters often become really funny stories! They get better and better with time even if they sometimes get a little exaggerated with each telling.
Little disasters might include things like getting lost and driving the wrong direction for two hours, or leaving something valuable at a hotel. Maybe you buy a fancy new piece of equipment and then forget and leave it home. Maybe you’ve taken hundreds of pictures and then accidently erased the memory card!
While we have experienced all of these little disasters I’ll pick a few that became good stories. We’ll call them “Knocked Flat,”, “Knocked Flat Again,” and “Scorpions at Moab.”
Knocked Flat
Let me set the scene for this first story. My wife and I had been married a short time. I had done several camping road trips with my family. My wife had very limited camping experience. For the first time my job allowed me three week’s vacation and on a whim I got the idea of a cross country road trip. Surprisingly my wife agreed.
We had very little money so camping would be a must. We purchased the minimum of equipment including a flat sided umbrella tent (a square box, this became important later.) We did at least have a fairly new car we had purchased recently with payments we couldn’t really afford. So we packed up three weeks worth of food and snacks, and left our New Jersey apartment and headed west. We took along all our money, which consisted of a few hundred dollars cash and a couple hundred in travelers checks. No credit cards back then for us, and young people may have to look up what a travelers check is!
The first few nights were uneventful. We stayed at campgrounds in Indiana and Iowa. We were so exhausted after driving 12 hours we barely could set up the tent, eat some canned food, and collapse into our sleeping bags. By the middle of the third day we reached our first real destination of Badlands National Park in South Dakota.
Badlands National Park is still one of my favorite destinations. Imagine a barren rugged landscape eroded into otherworldly shapes over thousands of years. Great fun scampering over the crazy landscapes and exploring the trails.
We stayed at the KOA campground in Interior, SD, just outside the park boundary. We set up camp right along the river with the car parked under a big tree about 50 feet from our tent. Overall it was a perfect setting. More canned food for dinner, and we were tired but more relaxed because we were finally somewhere where we planned on staying a couple days.
We were tired from our very busy day and fell asleep quickly in our big roomy umbrella tent. Around 1:00AM my wife woke me concerned about an approaching thunderstorm. I assured her I had camped through lots of thunderstorms and that we should just go back to sleep. I carefully closed and zippered all the tent flaps to protect from the expected rain.
A few minutes later all hell broke loose! A huge gust of wind came from nowhere and brought the tent down on top of us. Howling wind and pounding rain were mixed with screams all around the campground. We were all tangled up in the tent that I had just fastened up so securely! When I finally found the door and managed to undo the double zipper I was greeted with what seemed like pure white light from the continuous lightning!
We dashed in our gym shorts to the car though wind, downpouring rain and 1 inch hail. The hail felt like rocks hitting us. Our perfect sandy campsite turned to pure mud and by the time we got to the car we were soaked and covered in mud.
Right about that time I realized all the money we had in the world was still in my pants pocket in the ten!. And the last time I saw the tent it was blowing in the wind wrapped around a tree. So out of the safety of the car I went. I did retrieve the money but at the price of multiple hailstone strikes. Back in the car we took stock. My head was bleeding from a hail stone strike and we both had welts from other strikes in the short dash to the car. We slept in the front seats of our Ford Tempo that night as the rain continued but the wind and hail subsided.
We woke at 6:00 AM to a beautiful sunny day as often happens after storms. I was afraid my wife would want to make a beeline for home, but she never even considered it. It was time to take stock and assess the damage. Everything was wet but a couple hours with the campground laundry’s dryer fixed that. The tent looked terrible but as we untangled it we found nothing was broken, just muddy and wet, so we cleaned it up and set it back up so it could dry.
Personally we were fine. Just some big black and blue spots from the hail. The car even fared better than I expected. It had a couple hail dents but had been protected from worse because it was parked under a big tree.
By 10:30AM we were back hiking, and climbing the Wall, a well known destination in the Badlands. More importantly we had a story that we have repeated many times in the decades since!
Stay tuned for “Knocked Flat Again,” and “Scorpions at Moab” in future posts!