A tent is the only thing in the world you buy to feel like you're in nature, and you end up lying in a puddle of your own condensation at three in the morning, listening to something crawling on the outer wall. That something usually has more legs than you have reasons to be there in the first place. Welcome to the campsite, buddy, your comfort died here and nobody came to mourn it.
Pitching a tent is a character test that every relationship will fail sooner or later. On the box, there's a photo of a smiling family in front of a tent that looks like a mountain villa, and after forty minutes you're holding three extra poles, one less than you need, and a structure that pretends to be a tent but looks like a broken umbrella that gave up halfway through from the side.
The best part is that moment when you tell yourself it's finally standing, you turn around to get your sleeping pad, and behind you it quietly collapses back into the grass as if it wanted to tell you something.
"Can be set up by one person in five minutes." A lie so brazen even a politician would be ashamed of it.
"For four people." Meaning four people who hate each other and won't move during the night.
"Waterproof." The water disagrees and lets you know exactly at the moment you fall asleep.
"Easy to pack back into the bag." The bag was sewn for a tent two sizes smaller and you know it.
A centipede in the forest is biology. A centipede in a tent is a personal attack and both sides know it.
Nothing reminds you of your own mortality as quickly as the shadow of a centipede projected by a flashlight onto the tent ceiling at two in the morning. It has one hundred legs and all one hundred are heading straight towards you, coordinated, as if it had a plan and you are the weak link in that plan. You have two legs and both are tucked into your sleeping bag and useless.
A few things nobody warns you about at a tent shop:
A centipede fits where you wouldn't even look, and looks at you from there.
It has more limbs than your tent has stakes and yet both groups end up in the wrong place.
When you want to throw it out, it disappears, and that's much worse than if it stayed in sight.
Don't tell anyone in the morning, they will laugh at you, and they will be right.
The point is you voluntarily paid to sleep in a plastic bag in the forest, where at night you are visited by a creature with more legs than your whole family combined, and in the morning you will call it a vacation. Nature didn't win. Nature didn't even have to try.
This event takes place on 10 dates
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