Click the right-most icon on the slideshow control bar to see larger pictures.

Dennis Shelley made a trip back to Indy from the Paynetown campground to pick up his wife, Barbara, and granddaughter, Paige. When he returned to the campsite there was quite a reception waiting for him. Some helpful club members had moved Paige’s tent from beside Dennis’s to inside it and were there to witness his reaction. The vestibule of Dennis’s gargantuan, super-colossal, tent is big enough for a religious revival.

When Dennis noticed the growing grass where a tent should have been, he immediate came to the conclusion that he had some very helpful friends, indeed. A DNR officer had come by for a a camp inspection and notice there were too many tents in that corner of the camp ground. When there are too many tents per square foot, the DNR is required to dig a drainage pond for the same reason housing subdivisions have drainage ponds. Paynetown would need one too. The footprint of houses, and tents, prevent soil from absorbing water during a rain. The water run off leads to erosion and in time the succession of a creek, stream, river, and canyon.

The DNR officer was nearly overwhelmed by the footprint size of the Pearson, Garrison, Peak and Shelley tents. He said, “One of these tents has to go or you’ll have to dig a retention pond. And that would be silly this close to a lake.” So faced with the prospect of digging all weekend, a solution was found to reduce the overall tent footprint.

With the DNR officer off to hunt for other offenses, Dennis thought it safe to re-pitch the small tent in its original location. There was a minor amount of grumbling but he did admit he needed the practice and the exercise.

I tried to be helpful by making pictures of the whole sequence.

I couldn’t resist doing a mental calculation on how many Dutch ovens I could have going in Dennis’s vestibule.