Running free in a yurt.
This morning we woke up in a yurt. Well I woke up in a yurt and Beth is sleeping in a yurt. It is another one of our new experiences. We are near Mount St. Helens in the state of Washington, and it is raining (welcome to Washington). It is our first rainy day since we left New Hampster before Memorial Day. I knew that the rain would greet us soon because I was talking to Paul on the phone yesterday and he was filling me in on the national weather situation because we haven't seen, heard, read any news in a very long time. During the conversation I realized that we haven't had any inclement weather and I mentioned this to Paul. At that moment I knew what was coming --- but this is pleasant, yesterday evening (under clear skies) I made the executive decision to rent a yurt instead of a standard campsite. Dad V. has always talked about living in a yurt and we had never spent any quality time in one, so here we are. In the middle of the night the rain started and I am really enjoying listening to it hitting the tent-like material of the roof. It is different than listening to the rain on an actual tent because that usually means having to hold off on your morning pee so that your partner has to go first and pick up the raincoats that are still in your car on the way back to the tent. If you are in a stubborn mood this could lead to a morning pee happening at two in the afternoon and an entire morning of saying “no, I'm just resting for a bit longer” through gritted teeth.
A morning in a rainy day tent also means worrying about whether your ground-cloth (the sheet of plastic under your tent) was placed EXACTLY in the right spot. If not then a puddle under the tent will develop, which you won't discover until you try to slide into your pants and they feel like an old wet washcloth, or you pick up your paperback book (so that you look like you are “resting”), and discover that is looks like it was inflated into a large vee-shaped wedge of wet toilet paper.
Now in a yurt, the electric heater has kept it toasty, As a bonus, I spent a lot of time looking up at the plexiglass dome in the roof watching it getting covered with pollen and things from the towering pines and waiting to see when the rain will stop depositing stuff and start washing away stuff. Raindrops are really neat how they always try to equalize things. If they are loaded with dirt they will share it with a clean surface, leaving some of the dirt behind as they change direction and then if the raindrops contact a dirty surface they will take some dirt with them when they head downhill in their quest for their ultimate goal: the freshly polished automobile and eventually the ocean.
The little dome on the top of this yurt also reminded me of the scene in “Fantastic Voyage” when the saboteur that wanted the “good scientist” to die decided to hijack the submarine and the last time you saw him, he was driving off with his shiny bald head sticking up in the little plastic dome to meet his ironic end by being attacked by the white blood cells. I was hoping if I opened up the door to my yurt this morning, I would look across at yurt #3 and there would be a bald guy sitting up in the dome trying to figure out how to release the parking brake. Being the fix-it-guy that I am, I would HAVE to help him. “Goodbye, have a nice trip! Watch out for those.... ooophh”
I'll just walk back to yurt #2 now.
If I put a couple of yurts up at Roland Park (with a large porch connecting the living yurt to the sleeping yurt), I would have to install an inflateable bald guy up in one of the domes with an inflate/deflate tube running down to a small pump so that he would be there when needed. Jenny would understand.
I think the best thing that yurts have going for them is the name YURT. It's as much fun to type as it is to say. Go ahead, try typing it, it really IS a fun word. It flows off the tongue and keyboard much easier than an archaeopteryx for example.
The major disadvantage of a yurt is that this morning I wanted to scratch my back on a corner, as I sometimes do, and I find that a yurt is not outfitted properly for back scratching. No corners anywhere, not a one.
So each yurt in my yurt compound would have to include a backscratcher hanging from a nail. Problem solved. There I guess I have solved the two major design problems of living in a yurt, proper back scratching and a remotely controlled bald guy.
Photos of the Yurt.
Ok, so I'm reading all about the yurt in your blog and I'm sitting there wondering, what the heck does a yurt look like, and you didn't disappointment me Warren, you made sure to include those ever important pictures of the yurt, so that we would be able to see what was so cool. And by the way, I want a yurt, they look awesome.
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