We got up this morning, ate breakfast, and headed back to the ranch. There was so much cleaning to do so that we could sleep in the tent tonight that we wanted to get on it as soon as as soon as possible. We got back around 11 and got laundry caught up and the tent cleaned as good as we could. I had this not so great idea to hose the tent down to try to get all the dust off. Had it actually worked on removing the dust I would’ve been glad that I did it, but that’s not really how it turned out. I feel like in some ways we got it dirtier than it was and didn’t make a whole lot of progress. Before hosing it out, I used a little hand broom and dust pan to get the bulk of the dirt out of the tent. I took about six dust pan fulls of dirt out of the tent.
We also drug the air mattress that was completely covered in dust out. Being our shopping trip for cots didn’t materialize in anything yesterday, we decided to set up the extra air mattress that we had in the truck. I inflated it, and as I was putting bedding on it, I knelt down on it kind of hard and it popped the air plug out. I was convinced that we won’t be able to both sleep on it, but a couple layers of duct tape over it that has actually so far proven to hold. Hopefully it’ll still be inflated in the morning as this is a very low quality air mattress compared to what we had before.
After arriving back at the ranch, it was pretty amazing how clean and clear the air felt here compared to Albuquerque. Our mentor tells us that our city living made us soft. He’s right. Surviving winter out here is going to toughen us up.