Places To Read, An Unintentional Multipart Short Story Series – Part 3

 

Camping

You didn't want to go. You would much rather have spent your weekend curled up in bed with a book, a cup of tea and snacks galore. Unfortunately, family obligations are a thing and, to be fair, you had promised to go. If only you had been paying attention and had know what you had been promising.

It's getting dark. You're in your tent, lying on the hard ground, wearing so many layers of clothes you might've thought it was winter, not the middle of summer. Why was it so cold at night? It was never this cold at home. Your sleeping bag is doing the most to warm you up, but you can't sleep.

Enter your trusty companion – the book your family told you that you shouldn't bother packing. Apparently, you wouldn't have time to read. You might lose it. As if. Did they really think you didn't know where your book was at all times?

Your torch doesn't work properly, you have to keep shaking it because it keeps turning off and violence is the only thing that turns it back on. You jumped when you heard footsteps and turned the torch off, pretending to be asleep. This intruder outside your tent might be there to kill you.

Never mind, the person climbed into the tent next to yours. But now your torch is flatly refusing to turn back on. It's too dark to read without it and your phone died earlier, so you can't use that as a light source either. You have no choice but to put the book down and try to sleep.

It's so early, it probably can't even be considered morning yet. Why did the sun seem to rise so much earlier when you were camping? Considering how late you went to bed and how early it seemed, minus the tossing and turning, trying to get to sleep, you can't have got more than a couple of hours sleep. But honestly, how could you tell? Your phone was dead and no one these days wears watches.

No one else is up yet, so there is one obvious thing you can do.

Avoiding touching the sides of your tent, due to the vast amount of condensation (did it rain, why is it so damp?) you try to locate your book. On a second thought, you open your tent first and pull your sleeping bag tighter around you. Might as well read with the sunrise as a backdrop, right? The grass around the outside of your tent is damp, your tent is damp. Anything inside your tent that was touching the sides of your tent is also wet. Your book – well that was safely tucked inside the sleeping bag with you. Your book is gloriously dry and waiting for you to read it.

And read it you do. Seemingly for hours before everyone else starts to wake up. Seriously, how did they sleep so well?

Hi!

This is drawn from experience. Usually, though, I fall asleep fairly easily when camping. My torch is just as broken as the one in this (it's a nightmare to take that torch camping. Getting up in the night and needing to use the toilet, walking across what is basically a field at night, trying not to trip over (or into) tents and then your torch goes out? Awful experience.)

And then waking up ridiculously early, when everyone else sleeps so ridiculously well? I once sat up for two and a half hours reading before anyone else woke up.

Anyway...

Bye!