Ok, so the first night sucked. So did the next day.

 Now, one thing about living in the Southeast is that we have a wildly variable climate, and a heck of a lot of wildlife.

Those two factors immediately come into play on our very first camping trip (yes, this is still the same trip as the bees). 

That night, after recovering from the assault on our yellowjacket neighbors and settling into bed, we had a moment we still reference...

Let me set the scene for you.  We picked a night with a full moon on purpose as our first night out. Our tent is white, so the light of the full moon bathes us like soft velvet draped over a marble sculpture.  The air is dry and cool, but not cold, almost perfectly room temperature. Late-season frogs are chirping in trees, and miles off in the far distance you can hear cows settling into the night in their fields. The air is still but not stifling, and all is perfectly well with the world.  A tree frog drops onto the tent roof, and we spend what feels like days snuggled on an air mattress with all three of our dogs in a big cozy heap, watching this little frog slowly climb up the slope of our roof.

Snuggling sweetly in as she falls asleep, my wife turns to me and says "it's so peaceful out here..."

Immediately upon which, a cicada mere feet above our heads explodes with the sound of a thousand fire alarms blaring simultaneously inside a metal trashcan.  The sound waves from this tiny insect were so deafening that I swear to this day I could feel a physical pressure bearing down on me from them. It was as though the forest, unable to cope with us in any other way, sent a riot control squad to pin us down in our bed while it cooked up plans for the next day. 

Exhausted, battered, stung, and pinned in place by the dead weight of sound pressing us into our bed like g-forces in an accelerating roller coaster, we fell asleep. 

The next day we awoke refreshed and ready for something new! Our dogs had yet to see the place we found in our previous hikes, so we leashed Nisba up and set off on foot.  The two others proved they could walk along just fine, but Nisba being a hound, well she likes to follow her nose a bit more than she likes to follow her humans. 

We got to the bottom, and started to set up camp... when it immediately started to pour down rain.

Against my wife's protestations, I insisted we head back up the hill, because I didn't want all our things (and selves) to get wet and add to the already hilarious litany of things that had gone wrong. 

This was the wrong call. About halfway back to camp, my wife slipped and twisted her ankle, spraining it badly.  We got to the tent, elevated her foot until the next day after the rain stopped, and then went home.

Forest 1, us 0.