A cold night, so that I only slept after some effort. Nonetheless, I was up early, at about the same time as the sun, + my activity woke Val+ prompted her to move out of bed before too long too. First I fetched some water from the pipe in an inflatable water carrier we’d inherited with the car (it was bloody heavy) + improvised a sort of sink out of an old piece of open trough that was up on a stand. Then breakfast, + then we started to collect fuel for our fires to come. An easy task – the field has clumps of pine trees, throwing down hundreds of cones. Also the bottom twigs of many of these trees were dead, + could be snapped off for easy kindling, plus there was much wood just lying around, either broken-down + rotten fencing, or old stump pieces, etc. When you add to these facts the condition that the whole lot had been dried by the sun until it was crisp + brittle, we had lots of perfect fuel. We accordingly spent some time collecting a whole lot of it, so we wouldn’t have to worry for some time.
We lay in the sun for a while – yes, hot again – had lunch, took a quick trip to the local shopping centre for no very good reason at all, then returned home + spent some time building an extension to our tent. We took our sheet of plastic, + spread it out so that it extended straight back from the tent, continuing the same shape. We used the rear tent pole for one of its poles, made another from a log, which we hammered into the ground, then fixed grommets – we’d bought a pack earlier to fix the ruck + finally had a use – around the corners + pegged it all down. We were pleased with it – it looked water-tight + made a good home for our food, bags, etc. We then built a fire + cooked the remainder of the hot dogs – this time with some onions. We were eating early because we were going out this evening – to a drive-in movie. It was quite a way away, we had a bit of trouble finding it, we were still early, the first customers. Expensive too, since the sound was over the radio + we didn’t want to switch on the ignition to use ours, we had to hire one. It was a double horror bill – the first “Maniac” appalling – one long badly-acted cliché. By comparison the second – “Silent Scream” – better.
Shame that our first ever experience of a drive-in movie was so disappointing. I don’t recall there ever having been such things in England when we were young, though outdoor screenings have recently become quite the thing… though we’ve never been. Neither Val nor I have ever been much of a fan of horror films, but we didn’t have a lot of choice.
Not sure you needed quite such a blow-by-blow account of our building work, but obviously it was important to us at the time. Me at the time.
Your tent extension description reminds me of the “Van Life” videos that so many people are putting up now (many of which I watch), where people describe down to the tiniest detail how they’ve outfitted an old or new van with all the niceties of home. They’re so proud of their creations!