Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I've been known to complain about the weather forecast around here not being right. This weekend was no exception. Oh it rained just like the forecast from my last post showed… but there's no way it was 50 degrees at night. It barely made 50 during the day. The nights were around 35. We arrived Friday night in the rain and in the dark. It took too long to set up my tent so I was left with a nice little lake in my tent. It's kind of cool to sleep on a raft and be able to fish from your bed, but it's a little chilly when you dip your sleeping bag into the lake in the middle of the night. It continued to rain continuously through about 2AM on Sunday morning. That's a lot of rain. And a lot of cold. For those of you that skied Sunday River on New Years, the weather was very similar.

We played some games under the big tent, ate some great food, braved the rain to see a bunch of fantastic waterfalls on a 3 mile hike, and made a toxic fire of death. The conditions were by no means enjoyable, and I'll be the first one to admit that I'm not a hardcore camper, but it was still fun. We were pretty jovial for most of the trip so that kept the mood light. There were a bunch of good quotes from the trip but my favorite came courtesy of Ed, “Any day I get to wear vinyl is a good day.” He had a lot of good days this weekend because we had our rain gear on the entire time.

Because it was raining, we didn't take a camera along on our hike. There were a few pictures taken this weekend so I'll post them once they find their way to my email inbox. Until then, I did a Google Image search for pictures from Ricketts Glenn. Almost all of them had people in them so I just put Ed's picture on a woman's body sitting on a tree over a river along the trail. Close enough.

I think this is officially the end of camping season for me. That won't be my last trip to Ricketts Glenn, but my next trip won't involve a chance of snow.

I'm no weather expert, but I think this is a bad forecast when you're looking to go camping. There's a flood watch out. I guess I'll have to really pound those stakes in so I don't float away. It's not all that bad. I mean tomorrow there's a 1% chance that it won't rain at all!

http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=benton%2C+pa

There's rumor going around about a camping trip for the weekend of October 8 so I figured I should buy a tent. I did some shopping around and found one I liked at LLBean but it wasn't cheap. I decided to head over to SportsAuthority to see what they had and boy was I surprised. They had a Coleman 12'x7' tent for $50. This was normally a $100 tent (I have seen it listed online for as much as $200.) I decided to go ahead and buy it. When I got up to the register, I found out they were having a 30% off sale on most of their tents so the final price was $35. Not too shabby considering I had been looking at a $160 tent from LLBean.

On Saturday, I set it up at home to make sure all the parts were there before I trecked off into the wild. One of the poles was broken so yesterday I took it back to the store. I asked them if I could just exchange the pole because I didn't want to try to cram that whole tent back into the box it came in. Apparently the guy decided it was too much work to undo the bag that the poles came in so he just gave me the whole bag. They didn't take my name. They didn't look at my receipt. They just gave me a complete new set of poles when I showed them one broken pole.

I don't know how these people stay in business, but if you ever need any sporting equipment, their prices are hard to beat. And if you just stand there long enough, they'll probably just start handing you free stuff to take from the store.