Location Taken: Bridgeport, Nebraska
Time Taken: November 2012
Camping during the winter months is both unusual and challenging. For one thing, the majority of the camping places have closed for the season. Most people don’t find camping in below-freezing temperatures that appealing. For another, well, there’s those below-freezing temperatures to deal with.
Which just makes the normal camping hazards like rain all that more worrisome. If it rains while you’re sleeping, and then drops below freezing, well, you’ve got a layer of ice on your tent.
Which made waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of rain slightly worrying.
Until I realized it wasn’t actually rain. I was just hearing the dried leaves in the tree we were under rustling in the wind. It just happened to sound exactly like falling rain.
Which was actually really awesome, because I love the sound of rain. I sleep really well when I hear it, and I slept extremely well that night.
Even though we were the only ones camping in this public recreation area in western Nebraska. Even if it did drop below freezing that night and my nose got more than a little chilled. Even if it was the night after a day of feeling icky (I inhaled too much sulfur while at Yellowstone, and I didn’t take to high altitudes that well, and had a bad reaction to both). It was still the best sleep I had in months.
Makes me kinda want a cottonwood tree of my own to have outside my window, to rustle-rain and make me sleep well all the time.
