Does Anyone Else Have Bad Dreams About Giant Humid Canvas Tents? - Night 6

Night 6*
After my long day of working in Kroger (not for Kroger… in Kroger), I had ideas of watching another sunset tonight, but by the time I was done, I needed to get over to my new campground at Grayton Beach State Park and get set up before it got too dark.

You may have begun to suspect it, but I’ll just say it out loud: I’m not a huge fan of sleeping in the car, even in a big, boxy Honda Pilot. There are LOTS of positives to sleeping in the car, starting with not needing to buy a camper or RV to travel. You might say, “well, you could sleep in a tent and not have to buy a camper or RV”… and you’re right. There’s one flaw in your argument: the tent.

Fig. A: Not a tent.

When we were growing up, we used to go camping every two or three weekends during the summer. I don’t know why my dad latched on to camping - he was born and bred in Brooklyn. Or maybe that’s why. It was a whole different world than he came up in.

In any case, he would bring mom and us four kids, along with our beagle, Kully. Sometimes we stayed in a cabin but usually we camped in a giant tent that could fit all of us.

Now, when I say “tent,” you may picture a big plastic dome strapped to flexible plastic poles that criss-cross over the top - ultralight, easy to put up, pull down, stow in its original box, etc.

That tent you are imagining is about as similar to our tent as a Lamborghini is to a covered wagon. Our tent was made of heavy canvas, and supported by what the manufacturer claimed were aluminum poles, but which I would wager were made of steel. Folded up, the tent was the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, but just a little bit heavier.

Setting the tent up took an entire afternoon. We’d need to unfold it and lay it out on the ground, then spin it around so that the main opening of the tent faced the center of the camping spot. Keep in mind that dad’s work crew were ages 10, 9, 8 and 5, and our mother, and our beagle.

You’ve heard the saying, “You can’t scare me - I used to hold the flashlight for my dad”? This was that times five. Imagine four kids under 10 and a woman who’s had just about enough of this working their asses off to lift and drag a massive, heavy canvas rectangle around in the dirt, trying to get the alignment right…

AND THEN having to assemble poles that Ringling Bros. passed on because making the elephants carry them would have surpassed even their standards of animal cruelty, THEN find the canvas loops to stick the poles through, THEN get all them connected across the top of the massive canvas rectangle…

AND THEN somehow raising the entire structure up to its full 9-foot height, using the same physics employed when lifting yourself off the ground by your shoestrings, and dad running around driving stakes into the hard dirt while mom and the kids screamed about how we can’t hold the poles up any longer and Kully impersonated a pack of his cousins in a full-on fox hunt.

Imagine the fun of this exercise on a July afternoon with temps in the low 100s and humidity a click above that.

That sort of family experience taught us four children that a marriage can survive anything, but maybe don’t test it.

Come nightfall, the tent invariably was raised and we collapsed inside, kids on the floor and mom and dad on sagging army cots. That’s where the genius of the tent’s heavy canvas design really came through. As the evening temperatures plummeted into the 90s, the less-than-breathable fabric turned our shelter into a terrarium. We unzipped the flaps covering the windows, but the air was so thick it couldn’t squeeze through the holes in the screens.

Eventually exhaustion, both physical and heat, rendered us all unconscious, strewn around the floor of the tent. That’s when it got really dicey. About halfway through the night, I’d realize I needed to pee. Opening my eyes, I stared through the watery atmosphere at the roof of the tent, a perfectly symmetrical diamond shape that gave NO indication the direction of the exit. You might ask why I didn’t just look for the wall without the windows, but in the pitch black of the night, it was impossible to distinguish wall from window from zippered door.

So I’d have to make my way to a wall, put one hand on the canvas, then pick a direction and walk around the perimeter of the tent until I came across the hatch, almost always stepping on a sibling(s) and/or banging my shin on one of my parents’ cots along the way.

If it happened to be raining outside (which it usually was), I’d have to accomplish this task without actually touching the side of the tent, because if you did touch the canvas, water would leak through at that spot. I swear to God. And the tent manufacturer did not deem this a design flaw, apparently.

If I managed to somehow reach the exit without waking anyone, that was soon remedied: I don’t know why, but there is NOTHING louder than a tent zipper in the middle of the night, particularly when the zipper in question was made using 1950s materials and technology, and the sound was then amplified across the taut canvas like seismic waves across solid granite.

Door open and entire family awake, I’d step through the hatch, consistently tripping on the narrow strip of canvas across the bottom of the hatch, take care of my business far enough away from the tent that no one could hear but not so far away that I couldn’t make a run for the tent if a bear jumped out of the woods, then slink back in and lay down.

Repeat that process six times, sometimes more depending on the soda consumption the previous night. I still have dreams about being lost in that damn tent trying desperately to find my way out.

So, no, I’m not going to sleep in a tent, no matter how uncomfortable the car is.

Having registered for and inspected my campsite in Grayton Beach State Park, I jumped in the tent… er… Pilot, and headed over the VERY famous Red Bar in Grayton Beach. The town of Grayton Beach is cool - a hopping bar scene tightly ensconced in a small, residential community of old wood frame houses.


Fig. B: Funky cool Grayton Beach

Fig. C: The famous Red Bar


Inside, the Red Bar was really cool, and really red, with different rooms boasting different vibes, and a jazzy sort of blues band playing in the largest. I made my way to the bar room and settled on a stool next to a man and woman, clearly old friends on a night out.

Fig. D: The red bar at the Red Bar. That’s my beer.

The woman told me of her grandfather, who was one of the earliest settlers of Grayton Beach, and how she still lived in the house he built. Her friend gave me tips on good places to go in the area if I got the chance.

I don’t want to pat myself on the back, but I was in rare conversational form, entertaining the couple and myself with stories and jokes. At one point they asked how I found myself in Grayton Beach, and I told them I was traveling along the Florida coast camping out here and there.

They asked what kind of rig I had - a tent, or camper, or RV, or camper van? And I said, “I’m sleeping in my car.”

And I have to say: the vibe changed. Soon after that they were gone and I was headed back to my campsite, understanding that there might be ONE advantage a tent has over a car: you don’t sound like a hobo.


* Moment of Truthiness: I’m already back from my walkabout. In fact, it occurred LAST year about this time. I was going to post about it after the trip, but I sort of ran out of steam. So now I’m going to pretend I’m posting about my walkabout real-time, just like a reality show pretends to be reality.


Take the whole trip! I’ll even cover the gas!

TravelChuckCamping, Tents, The Red Bar, Grayton BeachComment