Divorce material: those easy-to-fold tents

So I thought about how I could make this May holiday a bit cozy. I don't mind staying at home at all, but we've already done that quite intensively for the past six weeks. Every cupboard is tidied up and I've developed an allergy to thousand-piece puzzles (especially the 1000 pieces, or the 989 pieces, because we always seem to be missing a few essentials) so that's no longer a pastime option.

Then I saw the light. It had to be a tent. Camping in our own backyard. A child's hand is quickly filled. They don't need to spend twelve hours on a plane to Thailand to find happiness. A tent, a sleeping bag, and a flashlight, and happiness is complete. Because I had previously owned a foldable tent that I could never manage to fold neatly, I decided to do some research. I searched and found the tent that scored tens on all fronts. In the cart, order it, and darn it, even delivered the next day. The gods seemed to be favorably inclined towards me.

We gave the tent to our daughters. Overjoyed. It also looked intensely logical. With yellow cords and yellow connections, red ribbons and closures, and blue ones. Then the yellows should go in the yellows, the reds in the reds, and the blues in the blues, and then there would be nothing wrong. This was going to work.

Unfolding was a piece of cake, we slid a mattress in, two comforters, and come on, what did it matter to me, the dog could join too. It's vacation after all.

When I checked Buienradar this morning, I just managed to swipe my kids out of the silver contraption in time. We lifted the mattress out, the girls took the blankets and pillows, and now it was just a matter of two minutes before my love and I would give each other a satisfied high five and slide the little lump that had been a tent five minutes earlier onto our intensely tidied attic.

After five minutes of fiddling and fussing, I suggested maybe looking at the little bag it was supposed to go in. There might be a drawing in there. We first had to look for a defibrillator when we saw how small that bag was. Or how big our tent was, it just depends on which side you look at it from. Ah, I had to go in, grab a rope from the corner of the tent and pull it outside, and then it would all go by itself.

Five minutes later, I walked to the garden with my laptop. There must be videos that clarify everything. By the way, Buienradar was particularly accurate because yes, it had started to rain by now.

On the Decathlon site, I saw a young girl who was putting the tent together with two fingers in her nose. They do that on purpose, I thought. Not an experienced, older handyman with a pencil behind his ear, but a girl just 18. If she can do it, then you can definitely do it. Something like that.

But she did it so quickly that I felt both like an enormous loser and had to press stop forty times to see what had happened in the last three seconds at the Decathlon company. Long story a tiny bit shorter: the tent lies about two meters long with a red band in the middle where it undoubtedly doesn't belong in my otherwise so polished garden shed, being an absolute eyesore. I'm trying to entice a handy friend today to solve the problem. While I curse and rant that I had indeed searched for a tent that stands in two minutes, my daughter says: ‘Yes, mom, but that's true. Unfolding takes two seconds, but putting it away is a whole different story.’