Camping 101

(brice writing)

At the beginning of the trip, we were extremely diligent about taking appropriate action with our food at night, making sure that all food was sealed up in one of the drybag panniers away from the tent (note that we haven’t hit bear country yet and know that won’t be enough once we do). Clearly, I need to reread Feynman’s “Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle” because the lesson we took from having no problems at all on previous nights was that we could probably stop paying as much attention to the issue.

So last night when I heard the always-sounds-bigger-than-it-is noises of a raccoon shuffling around in the leaf litter outside our campsite over where we’d locked the bikes, I didn’t think much about it. And when I woke up a while later to hear a pannier falling off of the picnic table by our tent, Susan and I both said “wonder why it’s going after that, there’s no food in there!”

After the enthusiastic raccoon noises continued from the picnic table area, I poked my head out of the tent to see a little guy with his head in the pannier. He wasn’t bothered by the flashlight, so I threw some pebbles his way. He backed off maybe 15 feet and then crept back in. After we repeated this a few times, he stopped moving in response to the rocks and just stayed at work. Clearly there was something in that bag. So I got out of the tent, and sure enough, there was a ziploc with 16 packets of instant oatmeal we’d forgotten about in there.

In my sleep addled state (that’s how my defense will lead anyway), I cleaned up the single packet he’d gotten to, repacked the pannier (this was one of the ones that just has a tight waterproof lid rather than an drybag rolltop that seals), tightly closed the lid, put the pannier on one of the bikes, and went back to sleep. With this result:

Somehow he was able to get his little raccoon thumbs under the lid and liberate all the oatmeal. All of this is particularly embarrassing considering that a decent part of my professional life has been spent convincing people that “but [this weakness] hasn’t caused any problems so far” is by itself an extremely poor argument.

Anyway, we cleaned up the mess and got on the bikes for a quick (aided by 20mph winds out of the south) 45 mile ride to Afton State Park. We crossed the river into Wisconson for 15 miles or so and saw nary a badger, so that was disappointing. Tomorrow we will ride into the Twin Cities for some rest days with some old friends we are extremely excited to see. Tonight we’ll put our food away properly.