Power, Sleep, Walk

 So a few things that were different this year that made camping better:

POWER

For years, I've been renting a battery pack from my CPAP supplier to power my CPAP while camping. I've tried going without a couple of times, and it's terrible - I wake up multiple times, my mouth is sandpaper-dry, I nearly fall asleep trying to drive home. The battery pack was okay, not awesome - I could get a couple of nights out of it and then we'd have to go charge it at our friends' electrical site (the ones who had a trailer and then a tent with an air conditioner - someone said how did they not know about tents with air conditioners and I QUITE CONCUR. The funny thing is, they didn't bring it this year because the mom thought it wouldn't be that hot, and the daughter (who is like me thermo-regulatorily) was very not impressed.

This year, I had gotten a new CPAP in June. When I called my supplier to book the battery backup, they informed me regretfully that the battery backup wouldn't be compatible with the new machine. While this was better than the time they sent me with one whose cord wouldn't connect to my machine properly, it was bad news. I told Matt I wasn't sure I'd be able to go. He said we would buy a battery backup. It was expensive, and we probably should have bought it years earlier since it would have paid for itself by saving us the battery pack rental fee every year, but it ROCKS.

It's called the Jackery Explorer 500 (Angus said "did you get the most macho one you could find?" I said I couldn't find a pink one). We got the DC adapter cord but held off on the solar panel because it was very expensive on top of the very expensive this already was. We did a lot of calculating about watt-hours, but honestly we weren't sure how long we were going to get out of it. I used my CPAP all night every night for five nights, we recharged our cellphones multiple times, and I recharged at least one fan every day. At the end of the trip it was still at 39%. This after I yelled at Matt (humorously) for using it to power the air mattress pump the first day because I thought we should save it for the CPAP, and when the air mattress was blown up and it was still 99% I said well if we blew up 99 air mattresses it would be dead, and Eve said it was already at 99% just from sitting the few days after I charged it. Plus we'll have it when tornadoes knock out our pwoer now, which is, you know, good while being terrible. 

SPEAKING OF FANS AND AIR MATTRESSES

I finally bought myself a double height air mattress this year, to see if it would make getting up in the morning and any time I had to pee in the night less uncomfortable and humiliating. AND IT DID.

Look at it. Look how glorious it is. Look how it shames Matt's puny, flat, condemned-to-crawl-on-its-belly-like-the-serpent-in-Genesis mattress in comparison. I wish I'd bought it years ago.

Last year I had my tiny fans, which made the hot nights bearable, but only just. This year, when one of my fans died, I couldn't find the exact one to re-order, so I tried ordering another one. This turned out how things often do for me, as illustrated in this post. It was a little too big to carry to work comfortably, BUT I realized right away it would be amazing for camping (then I realized that CAMPING FAN is right in the description, can't get anything past me for more than four or five days) because it had a light and a hook on the bottom so you could hang it upside down from the hook in the tent ceiling and angle it down. 

It also lasted for more like twenty hours, rather than the three the little ones last. So basically the whole sleeping experience was considerably more comfortable. Also, sorry if this is TMI, but one fun thing sleep apnea does, in addition to starving your brain of oxygen, is increase urine production, so you have to pee a lot even if you don't drink a lot. So I had to get up fewer times in the night, which is a little thing but a nice thing.

FOOTWEAR

Footwear is always a trial. I have terrible feet - plantar fasciitis, blisters - and ever since my sort of messy c-section with Angus all of that travels right to my lower back. I also have tight ligaments and unless I stretch a lot regularly everything gets pulled out of whack and my knees and hips hurt too. Some kind of pain is generally just a sort of background music the whole time I'm camping. I try to wear my running shoes to walk to the dinner-and-campfire site at night, unless it's too hot and they suffocate my feet. To walk to the beach I wear old sandals that can get destroyed by sand and water. This is terrible for my feet, which are usually getting ripped apart by the end of day two, and for my back and knees.

This year Eve and I were shopping with Zarah and Sophie and walked by the Crocs store. Eve had wanted Crocs for her Hamilton house for taking out the garbage and other quick out-of-the-house times, but she couldn't find any traditional Crocs in her size. So we both ended up buying Croc flip flops.

They weren't a hundred percent better for my back and knees, but they were a little better, and they WERE a hundred percent better for my feet - not a single blister or friction sore. Plus they could just be rinsed off, and I could wear them into the (kind of gross) shower. Regular flip flops are too flat, and if I'd known Crocs made them, I would have bought these years ago.

Eve's, which she has bedecked to make them cuter than mine, which is okay because they're the same size as mine so I can steal them