Given the size of the Basecamp, you’d think it would be pretty difficult to lose stuff. But lose stuff we do. All the time. It started with socks. Darren’s socks to be exact. Bit of background… you know how when you go into some people’s houses, you take your shoes off at the door. Well it’s like that in the Basecamp. And it goes without saying that when you’re camping, especially winter camping, you want to be cosy. So we have some very special fluffy, warm, snuggle up socks specifically for this purpose. The basic premise: you take your outside shoes and socks off. And you put your cosy socks on.
To be fair, I actually lost my cosy socks before even setting foot in the Basecamp. (The advantage of writing this a week later in Miami is that they’ve now turned up – in my laptop bag of all places – doubling up as flight socks!). So Darren was way ahead of me, quietly smug in his cosy socks as the overnight temperature plummeted. But in the morning it was a different story.
So the obvious place to put your ‘normal’ socks when you put your cosy socks on is in your shoes by the door. But no… that would be too obvious. Takes all the fun out of it. Instead, we have a prolonged ‘hunt’ in the morning for where Darren’s other socks went. After looking in all the obvious places, we were both in agreement that someone must have broken in in the night and stolen them. In desperation and with no easy sock alternatives available, he had to keep his cosy socks on instead. It was only after our second hike of the day that, feeling a tad warm, Darren peeled off his cosy socks… only to find the missing ‘stolen’ socks underneath. Yep, he’d been wearing them the entire time. Mystery solved.
And this brings me to the glasses. Not the wine/beer glasses, more the type that sit on top of your nose and enable you to see. Pretty difficult to lose, right? I mean, you take them off when you go to bed. You wake up in the morning and put them on. Easy peasy. Or not as the case may be.
There’s a saying that what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Not so where glasses are concerned. A week on and we’re still no wiser. So you know what it’s like, a few beers out on the town and you come ‘home’ (well the Basecamp feels like home and it IS so home!). You collapse into bed (and we had great forethought, we’d made the bed up before we even went out. Get that for organized). You wake up in the morning… and that bit where you reach for your glasses… doesn’t quite work out as planned. No glasses.
You accuse the other half. You feel around aimlessly. You shout and curse a bit. Eventually, you resort to the spare glasses so at least you can actively join in the search. Two hours later (I am serious here) of virtual solid searching, and still no glasses. I’d like to say that we found them later and they were in this really obvious place… But this is now a week on and um, still no glasses. It really is a mystery.
Moral of this story… when you’re traveling, you need to build in an extra 2 hours a day of time specifically just for ‘looking for stuff’.
Addendum: nearly 2 weeks on and nope, still not found the glasses. Maybe what happens in Vegas really DOES stay in Vegas!?
