The morning after...

I don’t seem to grasp the concept of thermal comfort the same way sleeping bags manufacturers do... This is my first (early) morning after my, again, first night as a camper in a very long time. That is, after about 30 years, I slept again in a tent. Well, what I can tell you now is that these years weren’t wasted. My stiff body, my aching joints and my general feeling of fatigue tell me I was right all this time after my first experience as a tent camper when I was a teenager. So don’t think I disliked every minute of it because I’m old and less fit... I had the same response to it when I was more elastic and energetic than a mattress coil! (get where the simile draws it’s inspiration from?)

So going back to sleeping bag manufacturers, I wish I could be told what the fuck they really mean by that temp. graph indicating the degree of thermal insulation, that any normal person would read like this: high temperature figure (in the case of my bag, +9 C) next to color RED – would normally mean being steaming hot inside if confronted with outside temperatures above that figure, I mean like pig sweating; the graph continued by lower numbers and colors changing towards the cold side of the spectrum to reach blue (on my bag, -9 C) when one can assume that although well tucked into your sausage like outdoor sleeping gear, you’ll get frostbite. Reasonable reading, isn’t it?

Well, all that decent interpretation of what otherwise seems like a rather intuitive way of presenting CRITICAL information about a product (not to mention that the vendor confirmed this when I bought the damned thing) was blown to hell by last night’s +14 C temperature that saw me, completely cocooned in the treacherous sac, uncomfortably cold to this very moment. That is, not even after tucking my head in as well, risking asphyxia for the sake of a bit of comfort thinking that breath warmth will improve my “thermal comfort”, I did not reach that elusive sensation of wellbeing. I presume that by confessing that instead of going out, enjoying the place, having a nice HOT cup of tea, or anything else a happy camper would do, I am still shut in my tent writing about all this, will give you an idea about how unpleasant the whole overnight experience was.

But let me not be unfair for picking only on equipment when reporting on this, I wish singular, camping experience. Yes, I was cold and uncomfortable on my high-tech slim air-mattress, all wrapped in my mico-fiber sleeping bag, but the “delights” of camping did not end here. Some ignoble jerks kept kicking a ball next to my tent until about 11pm, small and very upset children cried their way to sleep deep into the night, low grunt diesel vehicles (I presume more camping gear, this time on wheels) kept coming and going all night and to top it all, in the very early morning, when I was praying for a bit of sleep, THE BIRDS! All the singing birds of the world came to life in an unbearable chorus of chirps and whirls and twirps...
Lovely creatures, after a good night’s sleep I so much would have enjoyed their singing instead of savagely whishing them all stuffed!