Being out in the country and seeing way more snow than I was used to, I got a spark of genius to see what it might feel like to camp during this time of the year.

Before moving forward with anything, I had to talk to the sensible one in the relationship to see if she would be on board with it. So I made my pitch. And surprisingly she was.

Not wanting her to second guess this decision, I called Mactaquac Campground and booked one space, so that way we go there Saturday morning and come back Sunday morning hopefully. The best part about this place was that it was a 5-minute drive away from home so if we got cold we could just go home.

To top it all off even dad and mom got excited, so I got into research mode and started figuring out what we would need in order to brave the cold. The collection below is what we took minus air mattress and our clothes and some food.

A few things we packed

On Saturday morning I still look at Elma and see if she still wanted to do this and she said sure. So we made our way to our camp and set up the tent. First I set it up in a location where I thought it would not get breezy, but then the wind picked up. So I had to make a wind shelter and then move the tent over there for some warmth.

During that time, Mom and Dad, wanting to do something to help, set up a fire and decided to warm up. Tea time rolled around so we made some tea on the campfire and we had an early meal of burgers, as we had to take mom and dad back home.

Right after dinner, we took Mom and Dad home because it was too cold for them to sleep and only me and Elma wanted to brave the night. When we took them home we also warmed ourselves up, went to the bathroom, and then we mustered our courage to go back to the camping ground.
We got there in the dark, started up a fire and then, of course, we started warming our thumbs up, the beautiful thing about the park was the clear skies and we had amazing neighbors, a family of 4 deer around us.

It was around 9:30p and both of us were tired so we went to bed. We got into our sleeping bags with foil liners and it started getting warm after a bit. I put on the woolen hat that mom had knitted me for my birthday a long time ago and then of course Elma had to take a picture of that.

I don’t know why she is smiling

I woke up around 12:30 wanted to use the washroom, it was too cold for me to leave the bed but I also had to go to the washroom. So I stayed up for a whole hour deciding if I want to brave the cold and go out. Finally, I decided I had to, so went outside and did my business. When I came back I was cold, I got into my sleeping bag and my foil liner, and then Elma woke up as I was shaking and said “so still having fun?”, so of course my stubborn self said yes, knowing how well I lied.

We both mumbled and grumbled for another 30 minutes and went yeah no this is too cold for us and, we are going home. So we left the gear at the camp and we drove our behinds home, we got home around 2:30 in the morning and stepped into a steaming hot shower, and then finally slept around 3:00 – 3:30.

She doesn’t look impressed

We will do this again maybe when the weather is a bit warmer, not -18c, and maybe when the voice of reason (Elma) is not around but it was an experience that we can cross off the bucket list that we did not know we needed.