The Naiad and I, along with Shell, the Sewphist, and another friend, are all going camping.

Camping is good exercise.  Even if you don’t do anything but lounge around the campsite and roast marshmallows, you still have to wrangle all your gear into place, pack your bag, and figure out how to put up your tent.  And boy, do those things take energy.

First, there are the sleeping bags.  This is mine:

When I bought it it came all nicely wrapped in its own personal little bag.  Once freed from that bag, no amount of effort on the part of Mr D and myself (working together) could ever convince it to return to those confines.

It has all sorts of weird drawstrings and pockets.  Is it supposed to wrap into itself and fasten with those?  Ack!

After wrestling with it for an hour on my own in an attempt to get it in a bag twice the size of the one it came in for this trip, I gave up and got creative.

Courtesy of my spare elastic stash, I managed to secure it into a reasonably handle-able bundle.

Now I just have to get it in the backpack!

Backpacks, if anything, are worse than sleeping bags.  They have so many zips and buckles and straps and pockets.  I swear, you need a specialised degree in ‘tramping pack packing’ just to figure out how to load the darn things.

Mine is ugly and lumpy, but everything is in it.  Good enough for me!

Part of the reason for the lumps is the amount of protection I need:

Sun and sandflies are not my friends.

With all this complaining, I have to fess up that I actually do love tramping and camping.  Just not prepping for it.