Milestone (Flashback) Post – First Steps

We bought the property in March of 2018, but my first overnight trip up there wasn’t until May of 2018 with Archer. The plan was to go up Thursday morning, get in two full days of work, camp one night in a tent, and then head home Friday evening. With a head full of dreams, but a body severely lacking experience, I was due to learn some pretty important lessons on this trip. My lofty goals for the two day adventure were as follows:

On the property, there was a small field cleared of trees where we could camp with a “driveway” path that was wide enough for the truck that lead from the road to this clearing. I had a camping tent I had used a few times before, tools had recently been purchased, and my wife had a screened tent that I could use for the day so everything seemed to be in order.

Upon arrival we parked near the road on the east side of the property. The open field where we were to camp is on the west side of the property about 1/4 mile away. I decided to scope out the path prior to driving on it, mostly looking for things that would puncture a tire. I made it maybe 100 feet down the path when I noticed about 5 deer ticks crawling on my clothes. Of course I was wearing loose fitting clothing, so this would be a treat. Bug spray helped a little, but I unfortunately got pretty good at carefully picking off ticks that had found some skin. The path was clear of sticks, so we walked back to the truck and drove as far back as we could. We made it back there just fine, but it was extremely difficult to turn the truck around. I felt lucky to have escaped without getting the truck stuck, and I vowed that day that I would never drive back into the woods again. I would go back on this promise only a couple of months later and come to greatly regret it. That is a story for a different day though 🙂

The high for the day was only supposed to be around 70 F (21 C), so it should have been a great day to work outside. The problem was that it was mostly clear skies, so there would be very few clouds seen throughout the day. No worries though I thought, I had a screened tent with me so all I had to do was set that up and Archer and I could get a little break from the sun. It was at this moment that I was taught (again) a very important lesson: If you plan to do something on a trip alone, practice new things or set up equipment at home to make sure you can do it alone. This isn’t the first time I’ve done this to myself and hopefully one day I will actually learn the lesson 😀

So about this screened tent. I got the tent from my wife whose family had owned it when she was a kid. It was a seemingly standard screened tent and nothing crazy that I couldn’t handle. It had a main center piece for the top with places to put poles in corners that would act as the legs. My wife had set it up alone as a child, and my family had something similar growing up so I assumed that I could make it work. You know what happens when we assume right? The assembly went exactly how one with experience would expect. I would get two leg poles in just fine, but when I would try to get the third and fourth in it would become unstable and collapse. I repeated this process with various attempted solutions for a few hours only to have them all fail. As my frustrations were peaking, I was mercifully forced out of my misery by the tent itself. After repeated bending and twisting one of the leg poles finally had enough and snapped in half. At this point, I accepted defeat and decided I needed to set up our sleeping tent while I still had some energy. Unfortunately, I had been in the direct sunlight for multiple hours and was extremely warm and tired. This leads to another extremely important lesson I learned that trip: The first thing to do when camping is set up your base camp before working!

I got the sleeping tent erected pretty quickly, but it still offered almost no protection from the sun. A trip to the truck was required so we could run the air conditioning for a while and cool down. Exhausted from a day in the sun, I’m not sure we made it to sundown before we fell asleep for the night.

Day two began with a lot of hope but much more tempered expectations. We enjoy fires when we are camping and we wouldn’t be up there enough to manage a garden, so clearing an area of grass for the fire pit seemed to make the most sense. With the space measured and marked I began to dig. I thought I had dug in the ground plenty as a child, and would have little issue slowly working my way through the space. Apparently I had never tried to dig through clay before. The plan was a minimum of 20′ x 20′ space fully cleared of the grass. In an entire morning, I think I lightly disturbed the grass in a 6′ x 6′ space.

At this point in the trip, it was clear that I had made some miscalculations and working any longer was the equivalent of banging my head against a wall. We took down the sleeping tent and did some adventuring on the property before calling it a trip and heading home. Although I didn’t really get anything done, there was still an enormous amount of knowledge that was gained on the trip. I very much expected trips like this since I was beginning this journey with very little homesteading experience. However, it turns out that knowing there will be days of struggle doesn’t really make the struggle in the moment any easier.

To recap the trip, here is what was planned versus what I actually accomplished:

Thursday (Actual)

• I got the sleeping tent set up!
• I broke the screened tent.

Which leads to the final lesson that I learned on the trip. “Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in ten years.” – Bill Gates

Mr. Gates only gives us two data points with that statement, but I feel I hit that trend line spot on with my first trip 😀

I hope you enjoyed the tale of my first overnight trip on the homestead. Have a great weekend everyone!!