Tent
So regarding that trip my brother Ben and I took driving around the country as very young adults.. You see, we were very green at this camping stuff, and cheap, so we outfitted ourselves with the most inexpensive and minimal amount of essentials. Basically a clunky tent and some crap ass sleeping bags. Also two bota bags for carrying water - they seemed more smart and fashionable than stupid bottles but, as we would discover later hiking all day under hot sun in the Badlands of South Dakota, to sip from these botas was to drink warm leather soup.
Anyway that was about it. We also threw some pillows and my acoustic guitar into the trunk, and headed west from our NYC suburb. With no plan, and no real travel experience yet to guide us in committing any real decisions, we found ourselves driving all the way the first day to the border of Wisconsin. Just kept going and going. Even an epic midwest summer thunderstorm didn't slow us down.
Of course it was late by the time we pulled into our first KOA of the trip, and two malnourished and competitive brothers setting up a tent for the first time in the fading twilight was, from a third party perspective, kind of hilarious. And that night we learned that sleeping bags right on the ground without any kind of mattress or pad is quite uncomfortable. Not that we remedied this situation during the whole trip at all. We just suffered for weeks with our poor decision as some sort of penance.
The next morning Ben was washing up and I packed up camp. I crawled into the tent, took the pillows out, turned to put them in the car, spun back around and crawled into the tent again, took the sleeping bags out, turned to put them in the car, spun back around and.. where's the tent?
That's right: I looked away and during that fraction of a second the tent.. just.. disappeared.
I was utterly stumped, still in a daze from a night of non-sleep of a full day of highway driving. I couldn't wrap my brain around what was going on. I could have sworn there was a tent here, and I'm pretty sure I even slept in it all night, and now it's gone. Was I dreaming?
Finally I snapped out of it and while scanning the landscape I spotted the tent about a quarter mile away, picked up by the wind now that it wasn't weighed down by any interior contents, rolling full speed like a giant ball, and heading straight towards a rather large lake.
Shit. I ran full speed over ankle-twisting fields of weeds and increasingly swampy terrain and just barely caught up to the wayward tent in time before it hit the water's edge. Phew. During the anxious sprint I thought to myself, "So *this* is why you stake those things down."