Stuck In Your Tent? How To Have Fun Anyways ©

 

Stuck in your tent?  Photograph by the author.

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® and hard candies are always fun, photograph by the author.

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.

 

Books that I have taken on wilderness adventures, photograph by the author.

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