World's Largest Sponges: Free! And extra absorbant.

Friday marked our entrance back into California, back into the sun. Not to say we didn’t see blue skies our whole time in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, but it was scarce and the sun that did shine shone cold. But yesterday morning we woke up in Redwood National Park and looked up to see cracks of blue sky through the trees, walked out of the forest into bright, distinct warmth.

We were especially thankful for this sunny greeting after essentially being rained out of Canada. You see, we’re trying to travel cheaply, and that means no indulgences on the essentials. We may be willing to fork over $12 each to see the world’s largest sea cave, but when it comes to eating and sleeping in a dry place, we don’t budge. OK, I may be exaggerating, but we definitely did our best to withstand the weather (we came here to camp, and we’re gonna camp, god dammit!). Here’s how it went.

The worst of it was on Vancouver Island. This wasn’t actually part of our original itinerary, but we have a bad habit of just throwing stuff in, an few days here or there, an extra $150 for the ferries, no big deal. Our first night on the island, we camped on a densely wooded ridge overlooking the Pacific near a lovely place called Tofino. It was beautiful, and, though damp, we managed to make it out of there with no worse than a soggy box of matches. (Although, we did accidentally oversleep to be woken up by a park ranger outside our tent calling, “Good morning! I must have missed you guys on my first time through, but we’re closing the park for the season in 15 minutes, and you don’t want to be on this side of a locked gate!”)

That day we discovered that we can’t afford whale-watching excursions, but had fun exploring a vast stretch of unspoiled beach. We left after we’d had our fill of contemplating life and playing with dead sea plants, just as the real rain started. After spending a good amount of time sitting in the car watching the water pound the windshield and arguing about what to do, we finally just drove.

It rained and we drove and we drove and it rained and then we saw A BEAR! Yes, ladies and gentleman, all the wet sleeping bags in the world couldn’t put a damper on my excitement.

But it did keep raining. We found a campground near Port Alberni that hadn’t closed for the season and set up our tent as fast as we could. In we went, safe and dry…for a matter of hours anyway. It’s a 30-year-old tent that hasn’t been waterproofed in who knows how long, so you can imagine how well it managed.

When I woke up, Jordi was still unconscious as usual (I swear, if someone would let him, he would sleep into old age, wake up with a gray beard down to his ankles like…what fable is that?) and it was still raining. My hip pressed into the old, faded egg-crate foam pad my dad lent us. It was cold. I closed my eyes and hoped that it was just cold, not wet. Not wet, please please not wet. I shook Jordi awake and realized my knees were sinking slowly into the pad as though into a gigantic soaked sponge. Dirty water was seeping up to us from underneath. And cue panic.

Now, you may not think this sounds like fun, but I’ll tell you that nothing beats drowning in your own tent. What a way to start the day! Splattering ourselves in mud, we loaded the whole sopping mess into the car as quickly as possible and raced off as though trying to escape some kind of horrible monster. Flee! FLEE! We did manage to get away (though we had nowhere to go), from whatever it was, but it took days for all of our stuff to dry, and even longer to get over the emotional scarring. I just kept telling myself we saw a bear, we saw a bear, we saw a bear.

But I write this now from the coastal town of Mendocino, CA, a little place full of art, hippies and sun, and as I enjoy the organic oatmeal cookie Jordi just bought, I can hardly remember the reek of moldy foam pads and the damp slime of an eternally wet tent. After all, as Jordi’s father would say, we aren’t made of sugar. We can handle it.