Camping, stick bugs, and brown snakes

Yesterday afternoon we left to go camping for one night, the third visit to Kettle Moraine SP - South. It's only an hour (usually an hour and a half because of traffic) away from our house, in the woodsier, lumpier, and rockier areas of Wisconsin.

We were gone for less than 24 hours but it was rejuvenating. We had a walk-in site which was mostly uphill from the car than "in." I forgot the can opener but was able to use my pocket knife. We had way too much food but that is not an especially big problem. We are discovering that the little pot the stove (Mini Trangia) came with might not be quite big enough; we used the normal, larger pot I packed for both meals. Then again, we ended up with more food than we could eat and making meals is a bit different when backpacking (I wouldn't take a whole can of mixed veggies, for instance, but some dehydrated stuff instead).

I've also been experimenting with how to keep the sleeping pads from drifting apart in the night and creating a cold gap. There is a strappy device that I spotted online but couldn't find it being sold and some people complained it didn't work anyway. Then I found a suggestion to use some of that sticky shelf liner stuff under the pads. We tried a couple of squares of that the last trip. There was less drifting but nowhere near enough anchorage and the liner actually rolled up in the night.

So this time I got more (it's $1.50 for 5 feet - and Menard's has a $1.50 mail-in rebate), enough to be able to wrap in width-wise. I didn't want to glue it, so I sewed up one end of the two pieces and then used twist ties to bind the opposite ends while setting up camp. The metal twist ties poked through, so that needs to be changed. I also think wrapping it in the center instead of near the top might help things. But all in all, after I readjusted once when we were settled in, there was only a negligible amount of drifting.

The moon was full and bright last night. We kept nice and warm, but some critter (probably a raccoon) got his paws on an open package of graham crackers (the threat of wildlife getting into food is very low there and we thought things were well tucked away). We also spotted a stick insect missing a leg:

And a (very harmless) brown snake in its red stage:

And now we're back home, with drippy noses. Don't feel particularly sick but there's a vague feeling that we're both fighting something. This means it's simple noodles and canned sauce for dinner since I'm not up to making anything more adventurous.