Coldwater Creek just outside of Merritt BC is a great place to get away. Deer, Bear, you name it are your neighbors and the creek itself is only about two feet deep with perfect little bathing pools everywhere. My new girlfriend and I decided to meet one of her best friends there and stay for the weekend. We decided to take the bus and have her friend meet us there. In doing so, we had to be extra diligent with regard to what we could bring. Tent? Check … Sleeping bags? Check … Change of clothes? Check check and double check. This was the first time we were camping together and I am sure that she was eager to make a good impression as much as I was. We arrived when the clouds were forming and decided to get the tent up right away. She mentioned that I would love her tent due to the ease of set up and how weatherproof it is. It didn’t take long to realize that she had forgotten the tent poles. No matter, I fashioned some dead tree branches and we had a pretty good facsimile of a tent. When it came to bedtime, we crawled in the four man tent and the rain and wind increased so that we were cramped in the middle and the tent was falling around us. Not only that, holes had formed due to the old branches I used for support. It seemed to me that it was steady at this point but my girlfriend (dear heart) decided to push one old branch out ‘just to make a little more room’. Naturally it didn’t work and half of our space was gone. The carefully positioned branches were now ripping bigger holes in the tent everywhere. I had to go outside and do the impossible in torrential rain at night with my girlfriend inside supporting what was left standing. Did I mention the Cougar tracks we noticed earlier? I was drenched from the storm, she was drenched because of the huge holes, and eventually a fellow camper was drenched as he walked over a HUGE tarp for us to sleep under. We woke up cold and tired early the next morning but with very warm memories of our first trip together. My girlfriend wants it mentioned that, to be fair, the poles are those folding kind and are very, very light; easily missed.