Peninsula State Park and Fish Creek, Wisconsin

May 20, 2012.  Peninsula State Park and Fish Creek, WI.  We're sitting in Harvey watching a thunderstorm roll in over the Green Bay.  Distant thunder is followed by a light shower.  The rain will dissipate tonight and we'll awake to blue skies again.  The weather here in Door County has been perfect, seventy-degree days and cool nights.  It could not have been better. 

Today has been a slow day.  We slept late, then went into Fish Creek, another harbor town, for lunch.  We walked the waterfront and found the real-life Malachi and Annie sitting on a bench.  After, we walked the length of Main Street and found beautiful flowers planted everywhere.  There are three times the number of pictures shown on this page.  I thought you might get tired of seeing them, so I selected just a few. 

We have had some problems with the house batteries aboard Harvey.  You will recall that we replaced the batteries on the way to Alaska last summer and again, in New Hampshire, last fall.  I am beginning to wonder if the problem has been something other than the batteries all along.  You'd think that might have occurred to me $650 ago. 

When Annie and I set up the screen tent pictured in an earlier post, we had a tussle getting the post to extend.  It isn't supposed to be hard.  The instructions say that it should go up in 60 seconds or less.  It took us about ten minutes.  After it was up, the tent seemed extremely taut.  We worried that the poles might tear the fabric. 

The second night, while dinner was cooking on the grill, I went back into the tent and began to really look at it.  The poles had loops midway down, as if to hold the tent from the outside, rather than the inside.  They served no purpose on the inside.  I then noticed ropes hanging from the poles two-thirds of the way down.  It was as if the ropes were designed to stake the tent from the outside.  What were they doing on the inside?

I called to Annie.  "Do you see what I see in here?"

She studied the interior - that looked a lot like the exterior should look.   She had two words for me, "You Doofus." 

Under my supreme leadership, we - I emphasize "we" - had erected the tent inside out.  The posts go on the outside and we had them on the inside.  It should have been a clue when the name "Coleman" was readable from the inside of the tent and reversed on the outside. 

So, that's how it hasn't occurred to me that our electrical problems might be something other than the batteries.  I am a doofus.