Tent testing and Berry Picking

Earlier this summer we bought a ginormous tent, and waited and waited for the proper weather to try camping in the forest north of the city. It was rainy a lot this summer, or just plain too cold, and then Ruby and I took our trip, and then more rain… you get the idea. Then I started work. Finally, it seemed like there would never be a good time. So I said to hell with camping, let’s just take the tent up to the forest and test it out. We’d never been able to put it up because it’s too big for any room in our house. So, one Sunday afternoon we went up to the forest armed with lunch and berry picking pails and had a very nice time.

We were grilling fiskekaker. Yum, norwegian food.

Someone else had dragged these rocks over around the tree. I guess just to have a fort, though there was a charred piece of wood in there. Not a very smart fire place, though, with those two trees there. You know, they are made out of wood and all.

C came home the other day and told me that his friend found some soap under the slide at school. They told the teachers, and C said that one of his teachers told them that some kind of soap you could eat, but some kind of soap was dangerous. C was adamant that his teacher said you could eat soap. It wasn’t until a week later that I realized the problem. The Norwegian word for soap is såpe (sounds a lot like the english word for soap, with “uh” at the end). And the Norwegian word for mushroom is sopp, which sounds kind of like såpe.

So… does he think mushrooms are made of soap? (Or vice versa?) We should talk to him about this.

The two bits at the ends are rather normal sized two-person tents, and there’s a center sun-shade portion that could also be sleepable with a tarp down.

It’s a lot bigger than it looks like in this picture.

We also brought some of the new camping things we acquired in the States, to test them out. We all got sleeping bags and camp pads. Very cozy!

Love the blurring with the ultra-thin depth-of-field.

Funny to read this old comment… now I’d be annoyed at the blurring and would look for ways to minimize it. (I guess it was sort of pretty, though.)

After we went berry picking, we returned to the tent and prepared our second meal: berries on short cake with whipped cream!

The light was amazing. Haunting. A cloudy day in the forest, in a tiny clearing… perfect every time.

That was our berry haul. Not a ton, honestly, but it was enough for our little snack.

I didn’t mean to get that mosquito in there, and it was a pretty narrow depth-of-field for it to happen to be in… pretty cool, though. (Check out the full-sized image.)