Sometimes the best campsite is the one right outside your door

As friends were leaving our house on Sunday night, they asked us a fair question.

“Why is a tent set up in your yard?”

No, not a bug-screen tent or an event tent. Our orange, two-person, three-season camping tent was staked out in the middle of the lawn.

Maybe I felt sheepish for a hot second explaining it, but the rationale was actually straightforward: my husband and I had camped in the yard the night before as a consolation prize.

We’d been planning to go on a backyard bike-packing adventure by taking our fat bikes up the bike path toward Palmer and then riding out alongside the Matanuska River.

But then it got windy — the kind of Valley wind that scrapes up glacier dust and hurls it at your eyes. And then it got rainy. Not just drizzly rain either, but the steady and cold type of rain.

So we said fine, we’ll camp out in the yard.

We gave ourselves a couple hours to do chores around the house and agreed we’d embark on our stay-at-home evening around 5 p.m. Setting the time was as much about having time to get some things done as it was making sure we didn’t end up spending the entire night on housework.

I have some self-awareness here. I know that on the one hand this whole plan was ridiculous. We do not have a small child. We are not small children ourselves. There was no reason to test out the tent. We have a perfectly fine bed in a house that is completely sheltered from the elements.

On the other hand, we wanted something different over the long weekend. And neither of us was particularly motivated to pack up the car and go scour the campgrounds for a spot on Memorial Day weekend.

We figured that even just camping out in the yard would be a departure from our norm. We’d hang out by a fire and eat dinner outside, then go to bed in a tent.

In the end, it was perfect. Instead of succumbing to Netflix, we sat at the fire and listened to our favorite music and talked. We made dinner with what we had lying around the house and sat out on the deck to eat. Even when it was raining, we kept right on sitting outside because what did it matter? As long as we were comfortable, it didn’t really matter if our clothes got wet because we could just run inside and change.

Our tent was a little cozier than normal because we could pile up on pillows and not worry about bike-packing them out. We slept well, even when it started pouring again in the early morning. The sound of the rain hitting the tent was soothing because we were warm and dry. It felt nice to be outside in a way that was simply appreciating where we live and how truly amazing Alaska is.

When we woke up, we wandered back inside and made coffee, like normal. Then the tent sat up in the yard drying off from the rain for the rest of the day. And then our friends came over and noticed it.

Overall, it was a good reminder that part of a good routine in getting outside is mixing it up, even in small or unnecessary ways.

Alli Harvey lives in Palmer and plays in Southcentral Alaska.