Shooting Stars and Blowing Winds

Holy Calzony. What a night this was.
Kevin, Krystal, Andy, Valorie and I went up to High Rocks to watch the Perseids Meteor show. Turned out to be a full night of shooting stars and camping good times.
It was Valorie's idea to pack up all the tents and get as many as possible in the shot. She wanted more!
She had a cool take on the scene also, she even got a meteor passing through:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/valorieshay/4888802337/

So, we stayed up all night taking pictures and yelling out, "OOOOHH!!!" with the rest of the group responding, "UH HUH! That was huge!" or "No way, I JUST looked away! Ah man..."
It was fun :-)
All night long, I expected other star gazers to show up and get pissed off that our tents were blocking all forms of turn around in the tight quarters up top, but to my amazement and joy, no one else showed up. We made good use of the view point, staying up till 3am before we all finally made it to bed.

The funny part came about an hour and a half later when I woke up to some howling wind.
Normally, the stiffest wind storm doesn't faze me because I'm confident in my tent and let the slapping nylon of the tent walls become a lullaby. But, this night, we decided to literally sleep out under the stars, skipping the tent, and just using a blow up air mattress instead. It was child-like fun laying on that thing just watching shooting stars pass by overhead. But, it all became a problem at this point because,
1, we didn't stake down the tents all that well since at 3am when we bedded down it was a peaceful, windless night and
2, 3 of the 5 tents were empty with nothing and no one in them!

So, I peaked my head up over my boots to look over at the tents and WHOA!
One was literally spinning like a top, only held down by one corner still staked to the ground!
With a yelp, I jumped up and barefoot ran to grab it before it went over the edge. Quickly I tried to break it down in the wind, holding onto bags and flys being pulled away by the sudden hurricane like winds. As I worked on that one, the others began to lift and flutter, pulling at their corners also.
We were short on stakes to have them all tied down completely, so I, fast as possible, broke down the tents before I lost them all.

The best was my friend Andy in a single tent. I come back to the mattress where Valorie is glowering at me for leaving her shivering in the blankets, but I couldn't stop staring at Andy and his tent! The tent wanted to completely blow away, and tumble head over heels, but Andy's body weight in the center was the anchor that kept pulling it down to the ground. The wind would gust, the front of the tent would lift 3 ft off the ground and a nylon profile of Andy would emerge from the taught tent floor material and then slam back down to the ground as the gust passed. To Andy's credit, he rode the storm like a cowboy barely holding onto a bucking bronco in the rodeo pen.

But, it gets better! At this point, the pre-dawn glow was happening on the horizon, so I further abandoned Valorie to go take pictures (she gave more dirty looks), but when I came back, the air mattress was on its side against the trees and Valorie was nowhere to be found. I eventually found her in the Jeep, still scowling at me. I asked what happened and she said the wind literally ripped the blankets out of her hands *laughing*
I lost major points that morning.

Grudgingly, the group all woke up and we wrestled all the tents and pieces into the Jeep in a big tangled mess and then high tailed it to the nearest source of hot coffee.

Good times for the 2010 Perseid Meteors :-)