camping with the rednecks

Fair week involves a lot of lists. After all, it takes quite a bit of equipment and effort to move 8 sheep, 3 boys and 1 rabbit to camp out at a county park 50 minutes away for a three-day period. (I was also supposed to take 2 chickens but I ended up leaving them at home. Sometimes, and only very occasionally, I manage to reduce my stress load by utilizing a glimmer of sanity.)

One very important item on my list was "tent," for obvious reasons. I even thought to check if the tent had the stakes in the bag with it, and I assigned this duty to my middle child, whom I love dearly. (I had to keep reminding myself of this fact as the day progressed.) He assured me that the bag of stakes was present, we loaded it in the car, along with approximately 1,234,216 other items, and headed for the fair.

We had a rough time of unloading the sheep and their various accoutrements, as we experienced a torrential downpour as soon as we arrived. Eventually we managed to offload and the rain stopped falling, and it was time to put up the tents for the night.

And that's when we discovered that the stakes were -- you guessed it -- at home. It was also the point at which I had to keep reminding myself how much I love my middle son. Another storm was due, and the flysheet doesn't work too well without the stakes.

I had to send him away from me for a little bit, so I maybe didn't bite his head off, and then I managed to come up with a reasonable substitute. Behold, the redneck version of camping at the county fair:

Taken the next morning, with all our wet things hung to dry on the binder twine line; we used stakes that the parks department had left behind. I am pleased to report that it worked well enough.

Nothing says "farmer" like a home-made pair of cutoffs drying on binder twine.

My LSH is sleeping there tonight, so I could come home and get a decent night's sleep, a glass of wine and a long soak in the tub, not necessarily in that order. I go back first thing tomorrow morning for the sheep show, and then it is all downhill from there... All sheep, boys, rabbit and stuff should be back in our house/barn/pastures by tomorrow night, with any luck. Due to the rain-soaked ground, the fields at the fair are a morass of mud, and so far two truck/trailer combos have required tractor assistance to escape. My fingers are crossed that we are able to pull out with less problem. If not, I know where we can get some stakes and binder twine, if we can just figure out how to use them to pull a truck out of the mud.