What a messed up day, Part 2

Continued from What a messed up day, Part 1.

After a time-consuming struggle with the strong and constant wind (which, by the way, is what fueled the nearby fires last weekend), I made it back to my campsite, totally beat. Fortunately none of my other gear had blown away while I was off chasing the tent. But it wasn't nearly over yet.

My next objective was to figure out how to get my stuff into my tent. Y'see, it's not easy to keep a tent-kite in place when you have to use your hands to grab the stuff you want to put in it, partly because you need to hold on to the tent at the end but throw your stuff in through the side. Even if you manage to get all your stuff inside the tent, the wind still wants to blow all of it to freaking Mexico, and it can almost do that, even with the weight of all the gear inside.

Seeing how there was no point in staking out the tent (due to the loose sand and hard rock), I had to try to put the heavier pieces of my gear on the windward side of the tent. But when almost everything is out of the backpack, there is only one remotely heavy piece of gear: the backpack and the few pieces of gear that I don't take out of it at night. So I threw the backpack onto the area where my head would be if I was sleeping. The backpack alone is not enough to cover that whole side, so the tent was blowing like crazy, the poles bending to an uncomfortable extent, while I tried to get everything else inside the tent canopy, including myself.

Eventually I worked out that part. Me and all my stuff were inside the tent, sans rainfly, and I was relaxing, with the tent blowing like crazy beside me and in my face. Then came a huge gust of wind, and along with the wind came sand. With the sand particles being smaller than the holes in the tent canopy's mesh, I was now in the middle of a sandstorm, being pelted by the little pieces of earth-rock, which only blow into the tent, not out.

Now remember, I'm in the midst of a migraine right now.

Immediately I grabbed the rainfly, unzipped a door, and slipped my bare feet into my boots, not tying them. As I exited the tent, there was no longer 150 pounds keeping one side of the tent relatively in place, so the tent began flapping everywhere once again. But somehow I managed to attach the rainfly and get back inside the tent without it breaking or going on tour of Mexico.

Now that I'm safely inside the tent, this episode may seem over, but it's not even close because the wind kept up all night. So as I spent the night with my body keeping the tent from blowing away, I couldn't keep the wind from blowing the tent violently back and forth and in my face. I also spent much of the night worrying that the poles would break. Fortunately the aluminum poles did not break, but one of the poles ended up bent about 15 degrees in one spot.

I'm sick of typing, so I'll say one more thing: With the strong wind continuing the next morning, it was a bitch tearing down the tent and packing everything up. Also, all my stuff had tons of sand in it, which also is not very pleasant. I hesitantly slept in almost the same spot the next night, but there was barely any wind that time.

I think that's about it for the time being. I've felt lingering effects from the migraine for the last week. Actually, my life has been one constant headache for quite a while now.

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