Sands of the Gobi

Today was a great day for memories.

We went to the beach this morning and played in the sand and a tide pool. I wish we could have stayed all day, but The Little Ninja had a dentist appointment at 2:30 so we headed home for lunch and then to the dentist. Apparently he has weak enamel on his molars so he's going to have to go for check-ups every 3 months because he's more susceptible to cavities and breakage. Hopefully it won't affect his adult teeth. We'll just have to wait a few years till they come in and see.

After that we biked over to a local ice cream parlour that we keep passing by and had a cone each. When we went home, I thought he needed a nap, even though it was quite late by this point, so in a last ditch attempt, I offered a choice: we were going to go home and lie down. Did he want to lie down in his bed or in his tent? Easy decision, right?
As you would expect, he chose the tent.

So I set up his toddler tent in the backyard and set it in a shady spot. I told him to go lie down and then I started to set up my tent next to his, because I wanted in on the fun and simply do not fit in the toddler tent.
He helped me put the poles in alignment and then I quickly set up the tent the rest of the way. He wanted to climb right in, but I could see it was filthy. It was covered in red sand. Gobi Desert sand.

When I was in Mongolia, I remember saying after my 8-days-without-showering desert adventure that I would never be rid of the sand. I'd be finding it for years. I was joking at the time, but now here I was, some 8 years later, spreading the Gobi over my lawn.

I carried my tent with me for my entire 2005 overland trip from Japan to Holland, mostly as an emergency precaution, and I ultimately only used it twice (not even in emergencies), in Mongolia. The gers on those two nights would have been pretty cramped so I broke out my tent. It was a horrible experience because I had no insulating layer beneath me and I shivered the whole night, only falling asleep when the sun finally came up.

Anyway, I guess I never even opened it again since. Accommodations were easy to find for my entire trip, really, and once I got to Holland, I was looking for a job and a place to live and train... I never seriously even considered camping. And then once I had a job and a place to live, well, I never really had any desire. I remember packing the tent into a plastic bag and putting it on a shelf in the shed when we moved to our house 5 years ago, and there it's sat until today.

All those grains of the Gobi were just sitting there, waiting to be discovered. And it took an afternoon backyard camp-out with my 2-year-old, 8 years later, to make it happen.