Our most disastrous camping trip would have been so much better if we had listened to the advice of a local resident. We had pitched our tent in a campground, had our supper and then gone to a bar. On hearing we were visitors, an older guy wanted to know where we had camped. When we told him, he suggested we move our tent. Right, it was now dark. Not going to happen.

It hadn’t escaped our attention that he was drinking whisky chasers, so we put his comments down to that.

Some time during the night the heavens opened. A lot. So much so that the river above us overspillled and cascaded down the slope on which we were camped. We became aware of this miserable development when our sleeping bags became saturated. At that point, we didn’t have anything that wasn’t soaked through. Sometime in the course of dark o clock saw us trawling desperately through the countryside looking for an open launderette. The dh was even driving in his bare feet as his shoes were sodden. At around 4 am we found such a place. Into those dryers went everything we were not wearing: tent, sleeping bags, shoes, clothes, the whole kit and caboodle.

Yes, we should have listened to the words of wisdom, but who would have thought a river would be above a campsite? Had we listened with the appropriate attention, we would have found out this was the case and moved the darn tent. Epic fail.