Tent-bound
or “locked-down” because of COVID-19, being stuck in the same, small place is no fun and sometimes
life is challenging. Maybe these
thoughts will help – Author’s Note.
Have
you ever been out in the wilderness and the weather is awful? Maybe it was rainy, and you had to stay over
in the same campsite, tent-bound, due to the bad weather. Maybe you had no choice and you had to travel
in the bad weather all day long and now you are sitting in your tent, drying
out, instead of around a nice fire, relaxing.
What if the weather is okay, but the trip is difficult; the portages are
long and hard, the packs are heavy, the kids are inexperienced and uncertain if
they can handle it. Days like these are
always challenging, but if you have kids with you, they are especially
challenging, particularly if they are young.
So,
what do you do to make things fun? Here
are some things that have worked for my wife and I over the years to turn bad
weather or challenging times into fun.
M&M'S® make
everything better, right? So, do hard
candies. They are both reasonably light
and travel well. In fact, M&M'S® were
designed to travel well1, and as the Mars candy company says, "The
milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand" and also as I
say, not in your pack. What has worked
well for us in the past is to dish out candy on days when the weather is
particularly bad and we are tent-bound or miserable from the bad weather, when
the portages are long or trail conditions are poor, or when it has just been a
particularly hard day. This works even
better if the candy is a surprise.
Another
thing I do with single serve packs2 of M&M'S® is to give out a
pack to each of the two top collectors of the daily trail improvement game: the
winners of this game are the two people who collect the most micro and
macro-trash on the portages we cross and the campsites we visit during the
day! This makes portaging a lot more fun
and gives everyone something to look forward to and strive for, since we announce
the winners at dinner time.
The author’s homemade, portable gameboard. I can play a two to four-person game called “Shut the Box” or a two-person game called “Pirates and Bulgars”, photograph by the author. |
Games
are always fun and are a good way of winding down the day or overcoming boredom,
and kids, and adults, love games! The
two games in my homemade travel set are good ones because you can play with up
to four people, depending on the game that you choose and the game can last as long as, in my experience anyways, from 30 minutes to an hour. For those who are worried about weight, and who
doesn’t, when you must carry all your stuff on your back, my travelling game box
only weighs 6 ounces or 170 grams.
Sea to Sky Photography sells Discover Wilderness Survival playing cards with 52 survival strategies and techniques printed on them, photograph by the author. |
Playing
cards are always a good thing to bring on an adventure, particularly ones that
teach about survival! When I was a Boy
Scout we used to play Blackjack, or as it called sometimes Twenty-One, when we
were on trips: we used Ohio Blue Tip strike-anywhere matches as chips! You can also play Solitaire, if you are by
yourself. And a deck of cards is very
light, weighing only 3 ounces or 85 grams.
Reading
is another great way to pass the time, both for older and younger people. I love to read and just like the
turn-of-the-last-century wilderness expert Horace Kephart, I usually take a
book along to read, provided that my pack is not already overweight. And speaking of weight, depending on the book
that you decide to bring along, books can be surprisingly light. The two paperbacks pictured above each weigh only
6 ounces or 170 grams and the smaller book weighs only 2 ounces, or 57 grams2.
A spiral bound all weather notepad, that a friend got me for Christmas, and paper for writing with, photograph by the author. |
My
wife writes poetry and she likes to write down her thoughts, so, she always
takes ten sheets of paper and a pen to write with when we go out exploring. Obviously, I like to write as well and I like
to make notes of things I see, draw pictures of things that interest me and
when a good thought for a future article pops into my head, write it down. So, I always bring a notepad with me, or, if
I am concerned about weight, I bring just three or four sheets of plain paper,
which I fold in thirds and then again in half, when I am out in the woods. My notepad, pictured above, weighs 3 ounces
or 85 grams, and the three sheets of copy paper weigh less than an ounce, which
is less than 28 grams.
I
hope that these suggestions help you, and the kids that are sharing your
adventure, to have fun the next time you are tent-bound and stuck in the same, small
place due the weather or because of challenging times.
I
hope that you continue to enjoy The Woodsman’s Journal Online and look for me
on YouTube at Bandanaman Productions for other related videos, HERE.
Don’t forget to follow me on both The
Woodsman’s Journal Online, HERE,
and subscribe to BandanaMan Productions on YouTube. If you have questions, as always, feel free
to leave a comment on either site. I
announce new articles on Facebook at Eric Reynolds, on Instagram at
bandanamanaproductions, and on VK at Eric Reynolds, so watch for me.
That
is all for now, and as always, until next time, Happy Trails!
Notes
1
The idea for M&M'S® came to Forest Mars, Sr., when in the late 1930s, he
saw British volunteers, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, eating a
hard-candy-coated chocolate drop called Smarties. Shortly after production began, World War II
started and M&M'S®, which at that time were packaged in cardboard tubes,
were adopted by the United States Military, who included them in soldiers
C-ration packs, because of their ability to withstand high temperatures, such
as was found in the Pacific Theater.
From
Mary Bellis’, “Forest Mars and the History of
M & Ms Candies: A Legacy
of the Spanish Civil War” and from Nat
Bodian’s, "Looking Back at Newark Origins of World-Famous M&M
Chocolates".
3
Oh, and just a thought, M&M'S® Single Size Bags, the 1.14 Ounce (32 gram)
size, might be a better choice that a larger bag of loose M&M'S®, that way
you won’t have people reaching into the bag with dirty hands, either that or
you have to pour the M&M'S® into their cupped hands.
3
Book weight can be tricky since it depends on the size of the book, how many
pages and whether it is a hard-cover or not.
Apparently the average hard-cover weighs between 1 pound to 2 pounds
(454-907 grams) and paperbacks, because they come in a different sizes, weigh
on average between 9 ounces and 21 ounces (255-595 grams).
From
Jill Clardy’s “What Is the Average Weight of a Book?” and from the “Average
Postage Weights for Shipping” blog.
Sources
“Average Postage Weights for Shipping”, http://avgpostageweights.blogspot.com/2010/10/average-weight-of-paperback-book.html,
accessed April 4, 2020
Bellis,
Mary; “Forest Mars and the History of M & Ms Candies: A Legacy of the Spanish Civil War”, January 28, 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-m-and-ms-chocolate-1992159, accessed April 3, 2020
Bodian, Nat; "Looking Back at Newark Origins
of World-Famous M&M Chocolates", Old Newark
Memories, (April 12, 1981), Archived from the original on October 19, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20110716153908/http://www.virtualnewarknj.com/memories/newark/bodianmm.htm, accessed April 2, 2020
Clardy, Jill; “What Is the Average Weight
of a Book?”, https://www.reference.com/world-view/average-weight-book-cf771731e743d031,
accessed April 4, 2020
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