After several weeks of talking and planning and (this is the important part) praying for good weather, my party of intrepid campers loaded up and hit the road on Friday for what we hoped would be a memorable weekend.

Check that. We actually hoped it would be an enjoyable weekend. Memorable, I have found, is a gate that swings both ways.

This excursion was a special one – the first taken together with my girlfriend and her three young children – and we were determined to make it as memorable … um … enjoyable … as we could.

Two cars. Two adults. Three children (a 7-year-old boy and 5-year-old twins, one of each gender). More than enough gear and food. And a master plan. That, we figured, would be plenty.

It didn’t take long for the master plan to show a few signs of fraying.

“It’s clearing to the north,” I said when we stopped in Dover-Foxcroft, in part to feed the troops, and in part so that we could stop the same troops from paying attention to the rather impressive thunderstorm we’d been driving through.

It was, in fact, clearing to the north. And we were, in fact, heading north.

When we checked in at scenic Lily Bay State Park, the rain was over (or so we told each other). The mosquitoes were fierce, but expected.

The weekend would be wonderful. No doubt about it.

Then we began unpacking gear, lugging it down a mucky path to our campsite, and pitching camp.

By the time we had the tent out of its bag, it was sprinkling again. By the time I had decided which poles were which, it was raining.

And by the time we had begun actually assembling our shelter, it was pouring.

“I’m wet,” one twin complained.

“I’m cold,” screamed another.

“It’s raining,” another helpful voice chimed in.

They were right. It was wet … and cold … and raining.

And we were stuck in it.

Before long (but not before the ruckus began to rouse otherwise peaceful red squirrels and raccoons, I’m sure), we had ourselves a tent.

A soggy, muddy, wilting tent … but a tent nonetheless.

Karen took charge from there, marching her soggy children inside, toweling them off, tucking them into pajamas, and telling them to pile onto a single air mattress in order to avoid the larger puddles.

Outside, I walked around in the mud, pulling ropes, sinking pegs, and trying to remember how easy this had seemed when we’d done our test run two days earlier (when it wasn’t dark out, and it wasn’t raining).

Karen inflated air mattresses and tucked kids in. I stood outside and pulled other ropes and sank more pegs … not that I was avoiding the in-tent melee, mind you. I just figured that our situation called for a sensible division of labor. And I was perfectly happy to labor outside … in the rain … in the dark.

Before long (but not before I imagined that we were very close to being evicted from the campground) all three children were asleep. The rain had stopped.

And Karen told me a secret.

One of our air mattresses was not holding air.

“But the kids are sleeping great,” I told her.

“That’s because they’re not sleeping on the one that doesn’t hold air,” she told me.

As a 43-year-old single man who has no children of his own, it took me a minute to realize the gravity of that statement.

I tried to explain that kids could sleep on anything … even rocks … and wake up fresh as daisies.

I tried to explain that if we were sneaky, we could let the twins fall asleep on their air mattress, then transfer them to the equally comfy ground after they were asleep. We could even pass it off as a camping tradition, if they complained.

I tried to explain that I had been kidding about those two options.

But all along, both she and I realized one thing: We were going to sleep on the cold, hard ground.

The next morning, a bright-eyed 7-year-old greeted me at the picnic table.

“How did you sleep?” he asked happily, munching a Pop Tart, the previous night’s deluge forgotten.

I won’t share my reply.

That’s because there’s no sense in dwelling on bad things when you’re camping. That’s what I’d told the kids. That’s what I believed myself.

And that’s what we’d do. Even if it rained. Even if two of us were sleeping on an airless mattress.

On what turned into a busy Saturday, the kids swam in chilly Moosehead Lake, and played on a path that ran from our campsite to the water’s edge.

We tried our hand at fishing for bass at the nearby docks, but had little luck.

I explained that the fish we were targeting had met people before, and knew how to avoid being caught. (I didn’t say that I just don’t catch many fish, no matter how educated the bass are).

We drove to Elephant Mountain and hiked up to the B-52 crash site from 1963. All three children were interested, amazed, and appropriately respectful of the scene that unfolded.

We visited my sister and her family and had a cookout.

Later, we saw a rabbit (to go with a moose we’d spotted on the drive up, and a couple of red squirrels), and after a brief sun shower, we saw a beautiful rainbow.

Prompted by the twins, we began to spend the imaginary loot that we’d be able to split, should we ever reach that pot of gold.

Eventually, we settled in for a evening in front of a campfire, turning marshmallows into s’mores and gobbling them down.

Later still, Karen and I sat by the fire as light snores emanated from the tent. A raccoon stopped by to survey our trash bag … then our picnic table … then tried to run off into the woods with an uncooked tin of Jiffy Pop.

A large, fluffy fellow, the raccoon surely meant business, and he didn’t leave for good until we stowed all of our edibles in the car for the night.

And then it was time for bed again.

“About that air mattress,” I said, reviewing our options.

Karen smiled, but assured me that we ought to let the children have the best beds again.

That sounded good to me, and before long, I was sleeping on the cold, hard ground, perfectly content.

That is, I thought I was content.

When I woke in the morning, shoulders and hips and back stiff, I rethought that contentedness.

And when I opened one eye, I forgot all about it.

There, just a few feet away, sharing my cold, hard ground, was a slumbering 5-year-old.

And there, high and dry on the plush, bouncy air mattress, was Karen.

Eventually, a plausible explanation emerged. It seems (or Karen says) that all night long, children kept rolling off the air mattress and landing on her. It seems (or Karen says) that at 5 a.m., she simply decided to stop fighting gravity and swapped places with one tumbling twin.

And it seems (or so Karen says) that’s where I discovered them less than an hour later.

At first, I shook my head in mock consternation. I stopped that, because it made my sore neck hurt.

Then I started to chuckle. A few hours later, I realized something important.

We had succeeded in our quest, you see.

Our first camping excursion together had been an enjoyable one.

And it had been equally memorable.

jholyoke@bangordailynews.net

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